A Very Long Engagement

Manech and Mathilde were woken by the tiny soldiers walking on their heads.

In the opening sequence of A Very Long Engagement, a series of French soldiers shoot themselves in an attempt to escape the misery of the trenches.

It's WWI; it's the Western Front—and self-mutilators are severely punished. The men are arrested and dispatched, under guard, to the oddly named front-line position of Bingo Crepuscule. Once there, the men are told they must charge through no man’s land directly at German positions. This is tantamount to a death sentence, but the men have no choice: they charge from the trench. Machine guns start firing. The next morning, from the safety of his trench, the commander of Bingo Crepuscule shouts a roll call to determine if any of the men have survived. Miraculously, all the men, bar one, respond. What happens to them afterward is cause for speculation. Waves of men and shelling sweep across the no man's land, and in all the tumult the exact fate of the men is easily overlooked.

It's with this, the fate of the five self-mutilators, that A Very Long Engagement concerns itself. Mathilde (Audrey Tatou) is desperate to know what happened to these men, because one of them is Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), her childhood sweetheart and betrothed. When the war ends, Manech doesn't return. But so close is Mathilde to Manech that she’s convinced that if he had died, she would know it. Fired by this certainty, she begins to investigate the odd happenings surrounding the five men, and what happened to them at Bingo Crepuscule. Evidence that Manech survived remains elusive, but Mathilde doesn't lose faith. The sequence of events at Bingo Crespuscule is picked at over and over again as Mathilde talks to eyewitnesses, friends, family, or lovers of the five. Each testimony adds to the story Mathilde's compiling; each clue is a breadcrumb she hopes to follow back to Manech.

Quite frankly, in narrative terms, A Very Long Engagement is a mess. The viewer is given a thumbnail sketch of not only the five self-mutilators, but also of all the people to whom Mathilde talks. This is a problem. The film spreads itself too thin. In trying to cover so many characters, it covers none satisfactorily. Burdened with multiple characters and an unruly storyline, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is forced into using narration to keep the storyline coherent. Unfortunately, even then, viewers are left scratching their heads and wondering who's who and what's going on.

Problems with story are only the tip of the iceberg, however, because Jeunet proves equally inept with characterisation. Indeed, one of the reasons A Very Long Engagement charges off on so many tangents is because Mathilde isn't interesting or likable enough to sustain a whole film—she has to be buttressed by squillions of ancillary stories. Mathilde, you see, is frustratingly two dimensional. She’s defined solely by her obsessive search for Manech. What else is there to Mathilde? Not a lot.

And this applies to all the characters in A Very Long Engagement. They are gross and absurd. Caricatures. It's as if, incapable of delivering or imagining a nuanced character, Jeunet has gone to the other extreme: creating a cavalcade of Dickensian grotesques. Those who’ve seen other Jeunet films—Delicatessan, City of Lost Children, Amelie—will know what to expect. Namely, a compendium of whimsy, grotesquery, and fairy tale. All in all, a rather infantilised view of the world and the people in it.

In keeping with this presentation of character, all the performances are heightened. Everything from dialogue to cutting a loaf of bread is elevated a couple (in some cases a couple of hundred) notches above naturalism. Consequently, it’s hard to credit these characters with anything but the coarsest of internal lives. It's as if we're watching theatre and the actors are pitching their performances at the cheap seats. This has always been my complaint with Jeunet: there’s not a single “real” character in his films. How, then, is the viewer supposed to summon interest in their fate? Good question, that.

In addition to its other defects, A Very Long Engagement provides further evidence—if it were needed after the miscarriage that was Alien Resurrection—that Jeunet's virtuosity with set design and photography doesn't extend to action sequences. This film looks beautiful, but films are moving pictures, and it’s when he has to capture that movement that Jeunet comes up short.

Sadly, A Very Long Engagement is another in a growing list of Jean-Pierre Jeunet films that didn't succeed in putting me on the edge of my seat—except, perhaps, to give relief to my numbed buttocks.

5/10