Bomb-alie
A Very Long Engagement, the new film by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (most famously of Amélie), will have its fans. For one thing, there’s no denying its beauty, an onslaught of gorgeous tableaux, painstakingly arranged and shot through filters to exclude colors that don’t suit (i.e., anything other than sepia or charcoal). There’s Audrey Tautou, with her Audrey Hepburn mixture of sweetness and ferocity, hobbling about Paris on a polio-stiffened leg. And there is the epic story of a young woman who refuses to relinquish hope that her lover, missing for three years since he went off to the Great War, still lives.
Engagement wants to be a great movie, but it’s not. It marries a heavy-hitting tradition of wartime storytelling with the bravado of a Hollywood blockbuster. With confidence and ambition, Engagement courses through countless lives and scenes and delves into the pasts of its minor characters (digging up delicious details) to posit a comprehensive picture of postwar France through the weeping eyes of precious heroine Mathilde (Tautou) and her precious devotion to Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), her childhood love. But it’s too much — and too familiar — to succeed.
The film opens in the flooded trenches of the French front lines. Manech is a boy, just 17, and already shell-shocked. After he arranges to get his hand shot, he is court-martialed and exiled into the no man’s land between the French and German camps, where he will almost certainly be killed. No more about him is heard. Mathilde, back in the idyllic Brittany countryside, refuses to believe that he is lost. She struts off to Paris and hires a detective, then becomes one herself, hunting down every snippet of story that might lead to her love. Piece by piece, Manech returns, if only to die yet again in the mouth of another contact, many of whom swear he couldn’t have made it (though none saw him die).
The plot has been around the block. It comes most recently from the novel by Sébastien Japrisot from which the movie’s screenplay has been adapted, and before that from countless other writers, and before them from Homer, whose Penelope weaves away a score of years while waiting for her warring husband. The film seems to know as much. Its present (mostly 1920) is filmed in sepia, as if to remind us of the aged and weathered photographs from that time and to say that everything has already happened, is already a memory. (The war scenes, by contrast, offer a rich palate of gunmetal-gray, trench-mud gray, corpse-in-gray-uniform gray and the charcoal-gray smoke of explosions.) Save for a bit of wrangling with chronology, Jeunet does nothing to refresh the story; he doesn’t even bother to make Manech likable or compelling, so that we wish for his return.
Aesthetically, Engagement is a feast. Every scene is crammed with costumes, sets and props — or at least with a sense of its own important beauty. But this copiousness is a problem. Jeunet seems to want to wring emotions from a parade of visual treasures, but the film feels sodden, drenched not merely with mud and rain and period detail but with sentiment, consistently advertising either the wretchedness of war or the grief-stricken longing of its heroine. In the end, there isn’t much room for the audience. Even the score, by the minimal-leaning Angelo Badalamenti, swells with urging. Feel the longing, it implores.
Both Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children offered haunting visions that we’d never seen before. Amélie was forgettable, but it had the Jeunetesque charm of the quirky detail. But in A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet drags out one of the oldest of stories, hefts it a couple of inches, then hammers it onto the gigantic backdrop of the Major Hollywood Production, replete with explosions, crescendos, crinolines and long shots of bustling plazas. The point, presumably, is to sweep us into an overpowering experience, but the result is nothing but allusive and memorial. And boring.
