A Very Long Engagement
Short description
Set in France during and just after the First World War, the film follows Mathilde, a young woman whose fiancé, Manech, is reported killed in action. She refuses to accept the official notice. Through witnesses and documents she learns that Manech was one of five soldiers court-martialled for self-inflicted wounds and sent into no man's land between the French and German lines as a punishment meant to leave no survivors. Convinced she would somehow sense his death, Mathilde sets out to establish what happened to the five men. Her search carries her from her village to Paris and into the lives of people who knew fragments of the story, while the war's damage lingers around her.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed and produced, and wrote the screenplay with Guillaume Laurant, working from Sébastien Japrisot's novel. It was his fifth feature, arriving after Amélie; Audrey Tautou, who had starred in that film, plays Mathilde, with Gaspard Ulliel as Manech and Dominique Pinon, Chantal Neuwirth, André Dussollier and Ticky Holgado among the large cast of 68 credited performers.
Made for about 57 million USD, it took roughly 69 million USD worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.6/10 from around 78,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.3/10 from far fewer, about 1,400. A critics' rating of 7.7/10 from 146 reviews places professional response slightly above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet met with Jodie Foster at a cafe near his home where he filmed the comedy "Amélie" (2001). Some tourists were nearby who did not recognize either Foster or Jeunet and asked them to move aside so as not to obstruct the cafe they were planning to photograph.
- Jeunet met Foster while working on the dubbing of David Fincher's thriller "Panic Room" (2002).
- Initially, Jean-Pierre Jeunet planned to cast Dominique Pinon in the role that went to Ticky Holgado (1944-2004), and Holgado in the role played by Pinon. However, Holgado was diagnosed with cancer, and the studio categorically refused to insure him, so Jean-Pierre Jeunet simply switched the actors and roles, and never regretted it. Holgado’s condition deteriorated rapidly, he began to forget his lines, and Jeunet edited a rough cut of the film for him, but Holgado died before he could see it.
- The execution scene of Tina Lombardi corresponds to documentary footage of the last public execution to take place in France in 1939.
- Throughout the film, Manech repeatedly taps out (on the bell, on the rock, and then on a tree in no man's land) the letters “MMM”. These letters stand for “Manech aime Mathilde,” “Manech loves Mathilde”—in French, the word “aime” is pronounced the same as the letter “M”. In the Russian translation, Manech says “Manech is Mathilde’s husband,” “Mathilde is Manech’s dream,” so that the sounds correspond to the Russian spelling of the letters.
- The film is based on Sébastien Japrisot's novel "A Very Long Engagement" (Un long dimanche de fiançailles, 1991). Jean-Pierre Jeunet had been waiting for the opportunity to adapt his favorite novel for over ten years.
- "A Very Long Engagement" is the second collaboration between Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou after the famous "Amélie".
- The object Manek is crafting at the end of the film is an illustration for a handwritten book, a miniature in the medieval style. This did not appear in the novel on which "A Very Long Engagement" is based: Jean himself came up with it, inspired by a scene from Wim Wenders' "The American Friend".
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