Amelie fans, don't worry: Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement has the gravity-defying photography, lush visuals and quirky characters that made his Amelie such a beautiful, charming film.
Of course, when five French soldiers shoot gruesome holes through their own hands within the first few minutes of Engagement
it is also quite clear Jeunet was looking for a change of pace.
And what a change of pace this movie is. Audrey Tautou, Amelie herself, stars as Mathilde, a polio-inflicted young woman whose fiancée, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), disappeared in the trenches of World War I and is feared to be dead.
Mathilde begins a journey all over France determined to find him for, as the narrator of the film says, if he were dead, she would know.
What unfolds during the next two hours is so intricate and so wildly complex that it would be impossible to describe, aside from the delightful way that Jeunet and Guillaume Laurent's screenplay presents it all. An event will occur, unexplained, and then later in the film -whether through a flashback or another development -it begins to make sense.
This movie is massive, swooping from brutal battlefield sequences to violent murders to tender, romantic flashbacks, but somehow linking all the threads and increasing the tension. Jeunet does an admirable job of keeping the viewer with Mathilde as she sifts through the fragmented versions of what really happened to Manech.
The moment at which the film soars is when Jodie Foster appears (speaking lovely, fluent French) as a forlorn widow who holds a clue to Manech's disappearance. In fewer than 10 minutes of screen time, she makes an intensely moving and resonant impression that should have earned her an Oscar nomination this year.
Engagement does take a little getting used to. At first, the hyper photography and tongue-in-cheek flashbacks seem inconsistent with the film's somber tone, and with so much action in the plot, it can be difficult to follow. Stay with it, though; you may not 'get' everything, but it doesn't really matter in the end.
With such an ambitious movie, there are bound to be flaws and plot holes, but Engagement revels in the pleasures of vast, novel-esque storytelling, and the cumulative effect of all the pieces of the plot locking together is dizzying. Though there is violence and death, it is every bit as charming a film as Amelie.
A Very Long Engagement plays as part of the Athena Art Series at 4 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Wednesday. 17
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Matt Burns
