but she's a girl...

A Very Long Engagement

If you've seen Amelie and were put off by Audrey Tautou's slightly saccharine portrayal of a wide-eyed innocent, then you might also be put off watching this film. That would be a great shame, because it's a very fine one. For a start, it's really not a sentimental film, despite the title. It opens with a horrific scene of the trenches in World War One, and half a torso hanging off a blasted skeleton of a tree like a rag.

The story deals with Mathilde's (Tautou) search for her fiancé, the skinny, childlike Manech. He, along with four other soldiers have been sentenced to death for cowardice at a Court Martial for maiming their hands to get sent home. All have their own reasons for doing so, though one shot his hand accidentally when he was trying to whack a rat running over his blanket with the butt of his pistol. Rather than being executed by firing squad, the five men are sent over the top into no-man's land---tantamount to the same thing, though slower and more painful.

There's doubt about the fate of all of the soldiers, so Mathilde is following any clues she can find in the hope that her Manech is still alive. So the film is part war story, part love story and part detective fiction---something for everyone. It's a touching story, but also gripping and funny in places.

A small piece of ornithological geekery: albatrosses are significant to the plot, and at one point, Mathilde and Manech are at the top of a lighthouse and see a big white bird, referring to it as an 'albatross'. It was actually a gannet (Sula bassana), not an albatross, so either no-one on the film knew the difference, or they did but couldn't get any film of albatrosses. Alternatively, the translation for gannet might be confusing (my French vocab doesn't quite run that far).