'Very Long Engagement' a treat for the eyes
During early sections of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "A Very Long Engagement," you may think you've wandered into a color remake of Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of War."
We're back in the muddy, sandbag bunkers of France during World War I. Again some French soldiers -- five here instead of three -- are to be executed after courts-martial for cowardice. All had mutilated themselves to escape further combat.
And yet this isn't a war picture per se. It's a convoluted, labyrinthian, bittersweet romance in which the lovers share hardly a frame of film.
Jeunet ("Amelie," "Alien: Resurrection") directed from a screenplay by himself and Guillaume Laurant, which they based on the 1991 novel by Sebastien Japrisot, another pen name for Jean-Baptiste Rossi.
Easily the best-looking movie of the year, thanks to Bruno Delbonnel's splendid cinematography, it leaps about so freely in time with so many brief flashbacks that you may wish you could backtrack from time to time.
Through the dense narration delivered by Florence Thomassin, we learn that the limping Mathilde (Audrey Tautou of "Amelie" fame) was born Jan. 1, 1900, orphaned young and raised by her Aunt Benedicte (Chantal Neuwirth) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon).
At 16 Mathilde launched an affair in a lighthouse with Manech (open-faced Gaspard Ulliel), nicknamed Cornflower, who soon became her fiance and one of the five condemned soldiers.
The quintet was nudged into a no man's land between French and German troops, from which none returned.
Mathilde devoted herself after the war to tracking down anyone and everyone with any connection to the five, amassing the detail you'd expect to find in a James A. Michener novel or a four-pound biography.
Helped by an investigator named Germain Pire (Ticky Holgado), she talks with war veterans, wives, lovers and widows and examines every morsel of correspondence and gossip.
"A Very Long Engagement" plays like a sprawling, fast-moving mystery set in a period that anticipated the private eyes of the 1930s and '40s.
But it's plenty convoluted, emanating from multiple perspectives and featuring so many actors who somehow look alike you must absolve yourself if the threads become inadvertently entwined. (Wait a minute. Isn't this the guy we saw earlier who ... No. Can't be. He doesn't recognize her, so ...)
About midway, Jodie Foster turns up as Elodie Gordes, a French character of Polish background having a connection to one of the five condemned men. It's more a self-contained supporting role, deftly realized, in a prestige picture than a gratuitous cameo.
Like "The Phantom of the Opera," which also opens today, the 134-minute "A Very Long Engagement" has segments photographed in a monochrome to set them apart sequentially from others.
It's beautifully produced and exceptionally artistic in its observant detail and its crafty use of modern technology to recall the past.
It is for the art-house crowd an elegant postscript to a middling year.
Additional Information:
Details
'A Very Long Engagement'
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Stars: Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Jean-Pierre Becker
MPAA rating: R for violence and sexuality
Now playing: Manor in Squirrel Hill
Critic's rating: 
