War, wizardry and love

Audrey Tautou searches for a lost love amid the chaos of post-World War I Europe in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's ingenious "A Very Long Engagement," the holiday season's best movie so far.

By Charles Taylor

Nov 26, 2004 | Everything important about "A Very Long Engagement" -- its manufactured storybook conjuring, its sudden, unexpected sweeps of scope and emotion -- can be seen in the fields. Time and again this World War I drama returns to the French countryside where the worst battles of that war were fought. When officials come to draft a farmer enjoying an idyllic ride with his wife, a wind bends the long grass on either side of them as if nature itself were bowing down at the prospect of manmade catastrophe. We see that catastrophe in the battle scenes -- vast, desolate mudscapes that suck the life out of the soldiers with every step. The land is so bleak that its purpose seems to be to snuff out whatever life ventures into it. It's as if the soldiers picking each other off are simply doing the bidding of the fates.

So it seems like poetic license when several characters return to the battlefield a few years after the end of the war to find it lush and green and sunny. There's something touching -- also naive, perhaps, and calculated -- in the stroke of restoring the green to the devastated earth. It's a small visual metaphor for the movie itself, which is about a young woman who is determined not to let the war denude her life.

"A Very Long Engagement" arrives heralded by the pomp usually reserved for holiday prestige adaptations of praised novels, in this case, one by the French writer Sébastien Japrisot. The delightful surprise is how fleet the movie is, how light on its feet. This war tale/mystery/love story is an ingenious example of technological wizardry redeemed by a magician's instinct. At its best, the movie's calculation becomes dark enchantment.

The darkness was gone in director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's previous film, the huge international hit "Amélie." The genuine magic that had marked his "City of Lost Children" (directed with Marc Caro) gave way to icky sweetness. In "A Very Long Engagement," Jeunet has achieved the balance between the darkness of his first films and the optimism he faked in "Amélie."

There's a moment in François Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player" where a gangster tells a whopper and takes an oath that his mother should drop dead if he's lying. Whereupon Truffaut cuts to a shot of an old lady keeling over. At times it feels as if Jeunet has built his whole style of making movies on that one throwaway gag. He loves digressions, visual flourishes in the edges of the frame, animation, sight gags, fantasy sequences, all the tricks that the gizmos of modern moviemaking allow him to play. In "Amélie" the rat-a-tat deployment of those tricks drove me to distraction. "A Very Long Engagement" isn't a distractingly busy picture. There are still times when you want to tell Jeunet to settle down. When Japrisot writes that the heroine of the novel strokes herself to sleep each night while imagining amorous scenarios, it's a way of collapsing the barriers between us and the past (sometimes we like to pretend that folks in the olden days didn't think about sex). But when Jeunet shows us one of those scenarios shot as a ticky-tacky silent film, the barriers go back up. It's a cheap gag.

Happily, Jeunet is far more often an entertainer than a show-off. It may seem inappropriate to talk about a movie magician's tricks in the context of this subject matter; we may believe a movie about the murderous insanity of World War I should be solemn. But the movie's tricks lie in the way Jeunet and co-screenwriter Guillaume Laurant have kept faith with the book.

From his early crime novels to his foray into the historical novel with "A Very Long Engagement," Japrisot wrote puzzles built on the collapse of time and place, on shifting identities. (Japrisot's own nom de plume is a near-anagram of his real name, Jean-Baptiste Rossi.) The basic story of "A Very Long Engagement" is that of a country girl, Mathilde (played in the movie by Audrey Tautou), who learns that her fiancé was one of five French soldiers condemned to a barbarous death by their own side. Convicted of wounding themselves to escape combat, the five are ordered to the front where, unarmed and with their hands tied behind their back, they will be thrown into the no man's land between the French and German sides.

Next Page: In the fake-o era of CGI, a movie that whirs and clicks with the charm of a mechanical toy

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