A Very Long Engagement 7.7
Movie, 2004. In French with English subtitles. Rated R.stars Audrey Tautou as Mathilde, Gaspard Ulliel as Manech, and a host of other characters whose names have all turned into a French blur. (Jodie Foster makes a surprise appearance as a French widow.)
A Very Long Engagement tells two overlapping stories: the first of 20-year old Mathilde (Audrey Tautou of Amelie), an orphaned victim of childhood polio who lives with her aunt and uncle, as she waits stubbornly her fiance Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) to return from the war, and the second of aforesaid Manech, set two years in the past when he was first sent off to war and consequently reported as dead. The film opens with Mathilde narrating the circumstances of his death by execution--he was sent to the strangely named Bingo Crepuscule trench along with four other soldiers who had shot or otherwise mangled one of their hands in the attempt to escape the fighting. Convinced he is still living, the irrepressible Mathilde writes letters tracing possible leads, limps from city to city, sits in a wheelchair to gain sympathy and much-needed security clearance, and even hires a sketchy detective named Pire, who refers to himself as The Peerless Pry/The Peerless Pire (is this some sort of alliterative pun? I don't know). Over the course of the film, there are endearing flashbacks into childhood of the two young lovers; we see in one scene the scrawny, ten-year-old Manech carrying Mathilde to the top of his uncle's lighthouse.
While I thought that overall this movie was very good, I don't know how wholeheartedly I can recommend it, because there were a good many scenes where I couldn't watch (mostly the ones that earned the film its R designation). When the subject is war, there is always the question of how true to remain to the realities of human conflict, to the dark depths of man that are dredged up by exposure to warfare. With a film such as Saving Private Ryan or a book like Flags of Our Fathers, the decision is probably a bit easier to make. But A Very Long Engagement is primarily a love story, a movie that is at its heart not about a soldier but about the woman who waits for him. While it is probably good that the film doesn't limit itself to the sun-drenched villa that Mathilde lives or the bustling Paris that seems almost unconscious of the war going on, I still have to say that these are the parts that I watched the movie for.
VERDICT: 7.7/10.0, with a hand waiting to fast-forward and another ready to cover the eyes.
posted by alice @ 4:42 PM
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