A very good `Very Long Engagement'

A moving love story set against tragedy

MovieReview

A Very Long Engagement unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece. The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, compels a viewer to feel each concussive jolt of cannon fire as a transgressive act - and to cheer whenever a conscripted man revolts against the inhuman condition. But Jeunet's most astonishing achievement is his celebration of hope transcending carnage.

The movie hinges on the fate of five French soldiers court-martialed for wounding themselves in order to escape service. (Not all the convictions are warranted.) The army doesn't neatly execute them. It tosses them into no man's land between French and German trenches, on the theory that they'll fall to the horrendous crossfire. One of them, a once-brave yet traumatized youth, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), has the magnificent luck to be the true love of a heroically devoted Brittany woman, Mathilde (Audrey Tautou). A polio survivor (Manech befriended her when he was 10 and she was 9 - and other kids mocked her gimpy walk), she refuses to accept Manech's death as fact. She hires a detective (Ticky Holgado) to help search for him.

In a single enthralling narrative, Mathilde and Manech encompass the makings of a tearjerker, a war movie, a private eye film, a cliffhanger and a melodrama about arbitrary military justice. (The movie in part is an inspired salute to French cinema, from silent fantasies, serials and documentaries up to the New Wave.) But you never ask yourself, "What is this?" This film is cinematic in the highest sense. Courtship rituals, harrowing exposes, arcane clues and a sprinkling of baroque gimmicks come together with an emotional completeness that includes surprising fits of humor. Ultimately, it is moving beyond words. With Mathilde at the center, a handful of people make sense of their past and reconstitute their fate by every scrap of data they can find. The movie is about longing and memory - about longing as the fuel for memory. So even when it sojourns in the gore and muck of a Somme battlefield, it's the most robust romantic movie of the year, perhaps even of this young millennium.