|
Advertisement |
Overall Rating
  Awesome: 58.02%
Worth A Look: 16.05%
Average: 8.64%
Pretty Bad: 16.05%
Total Crap: 1.23%
8 reviews, 33 user ratings
|
|
| Very Long Engagement, A |
by U.J. Lessing
"Amelie goes to war!"
|
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films have always been fun to watch, because they are all well crafted fantasies (with the exception of the misguided Alien: Resurrection.) Delicatessen and City of Lost Children were both sinister, shadowy fairy tales, and Amelie injected enchantment into the world of personal relationships. Now Jeunet brings us A Very Long Engagement, a war movie with the same level of fantasy and enchantment. Can a war film be a fantastical while simultaneously expressing the horrors of combat?Jeunet’s Great War film is a strange combination of horror, whimsy and mystery. In A Very Long Engagement, we follow Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) as she searches for her fiancé who disappeared in the trenches of the Somme. She discovers he is one of five men who intentionally injured themselves to get out of combat, were forced into no-man’s land and left to die. Despite all odds, she never gives up hope that he is still alive.
A Very Long Engagement is a beautiful film with sweeping shots of lighthouses, a gorgeously recreated 1919 Paris, lush farms, and breathtaking ocean-side cliffs. We are also presented with overtly stylized violence. There are close-ups of screaming faces, carefully composed shots of soldiers shooting their own hands off, exploding Zeppelins, and exploding bodies.
The characterizations are fascinating but implausible. Mathilde is a determined angel whose personal quirks are listed off and presented in the same manner as in Amelie. Her lover Manech is sweet, simple and unrealistically naïve. Villains are snarling and one-dimensional, and as the mystery unfolds one idiosyncratic character after another flies out of the woodwork. No one portrays a credible human being.
All of this makes for light entertainment, but offers only a shallow insight into war. Like Life is Beautiful’s portrayal of concentration camps, it’s a form of exploitation that allows viewers to leave the theater with tears in their eyes, warmth in their hearts, and a sense that the human spirit can overcome the horrors of death camps, trenches and war. This is fairly unforgivable.
A movie that brilliantly exposes the horrors of the wartime mentality is Stanley Kubrick’s Path’s of Glory. Kubrick’s film didn’t expose the viewer to gore, blood or violent combat, but instead followed the plight of French soldiers of the Great War who refused to leave their trenches into intense gunfire (a suicidal act.) Path's of Glory points out that any military force at war is a fascist system, where the fighting men are at the mercy of generals who are willing to sacrifice them in order to appear strong. His hellish portrait of war is fierce, intense and real.Jeunet could have learned from Kubrick.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11186&reviewer=396
originally posted: 01/01/05 11:43:42
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
USA
26-Nov-2004 (R)
DVD: 12-Jul-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2004
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
