On Beyond Amelie
A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT
JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET'S films are like huge toy boxes for grownups. From his early collaborations with former filmmaking partner Marc Caro (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children) to his solo efforts (Alien Resurrection, Amelie), he's established himself as a contraptionist director par excellence-esthetic kin to Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Robert Zemeckis, Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers; a pop artist who puts his own directorial virtuosity front and center, and constructs complex narratives so packed with detail (and interlocking bits of technical magic) that they cannot be absorbed in one sitting. It is tempting to call his films superficial because so much of their magic is in plain view-and because, like his fellow contraptionists, Jeunet has a weakness for close-ups of people hollering into wide-angle lenses.
Surfaces deceive. Throughout his career, Jeunet has returned to a serious theme: the interplay of (and tension between) imagination and life. His near-classic City of Lost Children, about a depressed, imaginatively bankrupt madman who steals the dreams of unsuspecting kids, isn't just a clockwork fairy tale populated by joyous human doodles; it's a cautionary fable of imagination corrupted by commerce and the oldest generations feasting, vampire-like, on the youngest. Jeunet's international hit Amelie had super-saturated widescreen photography, super-busy production design, bullet-train pacing and a Frank Tashlin-Tex Avery-Rube Goldberg sense of comic structure. But it was more than a sexy cartoon. Its panoramic scope and playfully omniscient tone (complete with deadpan third-person narration) represented a serious attempt to consider the inexplicable, cosmic nature of attraction, and to suggest (unfashionably) that kindness forms the core of all that's valuable in civilization. Jeunet changes up his subject matter from project to project, but his movies all fuse life (such as it is) with its representations (movies, music, literature, gossip, tall tales, letters and dreams).
The contraptionist epic A Very Long Engagement, about a young Frenchwoman who refuses to believe government reports that her fiancèe died in World War I, continues in this vein, and re-teams Jeunet with Audrey Tautou, his leading lady in Amelie. But while the film is often delightful, occasionally moving and rarely less than inventive, it also confirms that Jeunet's style-and the contraptionist style in general-has pitfalls.
Engagement crosscuts throughout, starting with an extended sequence interweaving an introduction to Mathilde (Tautou), a beautiful country girl battling polio, and an account of how five soldiers-including Mathilde's childhood sweetheart turned fiancée, the angel-faced Manech (Gaspard Ulliel)-were tried and presumably executed for desertion. (Mathilde grieves at first, but soon begins to feel that Manech cannot be dead.) Jeunet's trademark storytelling voice-like a children's classic being speed-read by an auctioneer-is very much in evidence. From the spectacular opening camera move-which cranes down from a stormy sky, passes a broken Christ statue dangling one-handed from a cross, then descends into a miserable, rain-soaked trench-you know the director is working in his trademark prankster god mode, envisioning history (national and personal) as an ironic slapstick fable. (It's like Kubrick's Paths of Glory by way of Chuck Jones.)
Adapting Sébastien Japrisot's novel, Jeunet and co-screenwriter Guillaume Laurant lay out the stories of Manech and his four persecuted comrades in brisk, bold strokes. The tone is at once cynical and innocent-in a word, Gallic. The broken Christ statue at first seems to locate A Very Long Engagement in a universe where God is absent, blind or simply disinterested; yet the whole movie (the opening section especially) is filled with uncanny, spectacular events. And the character that believes the hardest-our heroine-receives a lovely (if limited) reward. In a flashback showing the conscription of Manech's fellow soldiers, a poor farmer from Notre Dame, the arrival of government agents coincides with a gust of wind that parts the fields like the Red Sea, rips hay from hay bales gathered in the farmer's wagon and scatters it everywhere. Throughout the film, a mysterious and willful albatross-likened in dialogue to an incarnation of unshakable will-hovers over key events, observing them from a god's-eye view.
Is God everywhere? Or is it just fate? We know, at least, that Mathilde and Manech are soulmates; her shy smile matches up with his. In flashback, we see Manech lying with Mathilde after lovemaking, one hand cupping her right breast. "Manech feels Mathilde's heart in his palm," says the narrator. In war, after Manech gets shot on purpose to secure a ticket home, he feels blood pulsing in his wounded hand and says, "I hear her heart beating like Morse code in my palm." Mathilde hires a private detective to track down people who knew her husband's fellow soldiers. Through the private detective-an ebullient gent with the très meaningful name of Germain Pire (Ticky Holgado)-Jeunet provides varying accounts of what happened to Manech.
He also tells the stories of the dead men's girlfriends and widows. Their ranks include Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard of Taxi and Big Fish) as the murderously angry girlfriend of a drafted Corsican pimp, and unbilled American ringer Jodie Foster as a woman whose sterile soldier husband gave her permission to sleep with his best friend so the family could have a sixth child and a mandatory combat exemption. (Foster's French is good, and her performance is tough and moving, but her superstar presence here is still a tactical mistake.) The movie's romantic high point is a flashback to Mathilde and Manech's first tryst, a marvel of sexy slapstick in which Manech lights three matches in a dark room, one after the other, and each struck match reveals Mathilde in a more advanced state of undress. Spielberg would be proud to stage a gag like that.
Jeunet keeps the invention coming, and coming, and coming. Like his fellow contraptionists, he seems constitutionally incapable of standing back and letting our imaginations do some of the work. He's so inventive that he wears you out. A Very Long Engagement plainly aims to be Jeunet's darkest, most conventionally "serious" movie. It's bloody and brutal. The presence of unseen cosmic forces-alluded to in previous Jeunet films-is foregrounded here. Angelo Badalamenti's heartbreaking score, which is built upon four simple notes that I still can't get out of my head, seems to unify the director's fragmented, distracted narrative and give the whole movie a sense of heft. But by the film's final third, just when you should be hopelessly wrapped up in Mathilde's obsessive quest to discover what really happened to her fiancèe, you may find yourself looking at your watch.
The problem isn't just Jeunet's one-damn-thing-after-another pacing, which seems derived equally from old movies and modern-day tv ads. It's his counterproductive interpretation of the cinematic commandment that it is better to show than to tell. This maxim is usually correct, but not always. Sometimes a strategic cut to black during a sequence of great sadness or violence-or a lingering closeup of an actor thinking while someone tells her a story-can be as dramatically powerful as the grandest, most elaborately drawn-out setpiece.
In that spirit, I wouldn't have minded a few more wordless close-ups of Tautou, who has grown from a striking camera subject into a poised and powerful star. Jeunet broke her out as a leading lady in Amelie, but in Engagement there are times when it seems that he doesn't trust to her carry big moments, and instead uses her as a narrative device, to get us into yet another epic/comic flashback or hallucination. When Mathilde listens to a description of how some soldiers' ammunition belts caught fire and went off like firecrackers on their bodies, we probably didn't need to see a recreation of that event (which makes it seem ha-ha funny, instead of grotesque and surreal), nor did we need a narrator to tell us what the storyteller said, and summarize Mathilde's reaction. At moments like this-when Jeunet is showing and telling and showing again, all at the same time-the master showman's veneer falls away and we're looking at a brilliant young film student who's so terrified of boring the audience through inaction that he bores them with action instead.