War, wizardry and love

Bolstered by nothing more than blind faith that her lover, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), is still alive, Mathilde begins hunting down the soldiers who were in the trenches with him, along with their lovers and relatives. She pursues her sleuthing through a flurry of letters, documents, private interviews, piecing the story together. The plot is insanely complicated (and the movie doesn't simplify it), but Japrisot gives you the feeling that you've latched on to something really neat. Following it is like listening to a tall tale where you periodically lose the thread but stay invested in what's going on because the company you get to keep is so ingratiating.

A story that proceeds by way of letters and documents can easily become static on-screen. The letters Mathilde receives and the interviews she has are, as you might expect, excuses for flashbacks. But Jeunet also uses them for all sorts of goodies, to allow cartoons or illustrations to bloom within the frame. He's an inveterate, and quite accomplished, doodler.

Jeunet and Laurant appear to have adapted the book by asking themselves at every turn: What can we do to make this better? Some of the changes are small but have a powerful impact, such as jiggling the time frame so Mathilde encounters one crucial character in person instead of through a posthumous letter. A minor motif in the book, a lover's message Manech carves into trees and stones, is made prominent here and used in one moment to give the film a sudden flourish of intrigue. The biggest change the filmmakers have made is taking Mathilde out of the wheelchair she's confined to in the book (it would slow the story down needlessly). She's still got a limp but it's not one of those handicaps meant to be emblematic of a character's soulful fortitude. When the wheelchair appears here, it's used as an example of Mathilde's cunning.

Jeunet matches his heroine's cunning by taking two killings that occur offstage in the book and putting them on-screen with such malevolent panache that you want to applaud. I broke out grinning at the sheer poetic deviousness of these scenes.

On some level everything in the movie, from the re-creation of the war to the beautifully articulated wooden hand sported by a bartender (one of the touches not found in the novel), works like a dazzling mechanical toy. Jeunet doesn't hide the artificiality of his work. He wants us to be delighted in the way the gears mesh and whir. Jeunet comes as close as any filmmaker can, in the age of CGI, to the charm of the jerry-built. The artifacts in his movies are both reassuringly worn, bearing the recognizable marks of use, and odd enough to have the alien beauty of something from very long ago. When Jeunet is at his best (and it's safe to say that the very early French fantasy director George Méliès would have enjoyed "The City of Lost Children") he puts sequences on-screen that, in their intricate visual and narrative design and the woolly precision of their execution, achieve a grave, melting frivolity.

That may be why the battle scenes of "A Very Long Engagement" are so effective. World War I does not have the immediacy or familiarity (or the clarity of purpose) that its successor has in our collective imagination. We know about the mud, the ruthlessness of the new weaponry, and the staggering quantities of dead. We also know the despair from the writings of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. But it's an event far enough in the past to feel odd and distant to us. (Maybe it even seems quaint, and if so, shame on us.) Jeunet both exaggerates that distance, with the funny, old-fashioned look of the uniforms and the almost medieval feel of the trenches, and pushes us right into the heart of the horror.

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