Hey, have you ever seen… A Very Long Engagement?

Bassignano:

Vengeance is pointless. Try to be happy and don’t ruin your life for me.

I don’t really get these Audrey Tautou flicks sometimes, this one and Amelie (both of which were directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet).  They’re playful, erratic, spontaneous and surprising, like a child who found a big-kid book and started arranging the pages in whatever fashion he wanted, taking bits and pieces of stories and placing them without regard for timeline or character, but somehow managing to put the beginning at the beginning, and the end at the end.  That’s not what I don’t get though, I understand that part.  What I don’t get is how Jeunet somehow managed twice to be so whimsical and yet still provide such a great emotional impact to go with the entertainment.  It’s a wonderful achievement.

A Very Long Engagement is similar to Amelie in that there are a multitude of short vignettes scattered throughout the movie, little side stories, characters who become interesting portraits in the few moments we have with them before they move forward and evolve.  It’s also similar in that it has Tautou as the female lead, a role which guarantees pixiness and mischievous smiles a’plenty along her journey for…whatever it is depending on the film.

But beyond those visual and stylistic touches these cinematic adventures are fairly well separated.  Whereas Amelie is a modern fairytale sort of film, Engagement is a brooding mystery wrapped up in a love story.  Five men accused of self-mutilating to get away from the bloody WW1 front lines are sentenced to death and sent into the no-man’s land between the entrenched French and German armies.  One of them is a fellow named Manech, who happens to be the childhood friend and adult love of Matilde (Tautou).

Upon receiving word of his execution, Matilde sets out to find out just what happened in those trenches and on that battleground to piece together the last days of her lover.  The more she searches though, the more the entire affair begins to complicate itself, and just who lived and who died that day can no longer be certain.  Through it all, Matilde steadfastly refuses to believe that Manech is truly gone.

The storytelling jumps from Matilde to the battlefield, to what the people involved in the periphery were doing then and now, and gently nudges the story forward.  It’s almost in the vein of a noir picture, but for Matilde’s infectuous cheer and unrelenting optimism.  The elements of this picture come together into a film that is rewatchable and endearing, more earning a place in your heart than in the annals of amazing filmness.  They can’t all be sweeping, world-changing epics, and when they’re like this, they don’t have to be, to be great.