A Very Long Engagement, (English Release Title); 2004, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet “Boy-O-Boyfriend!” Frank mumbles. His heart thump-thump thumps down out of his chest, squeezes past his belt and by-and-by slides down the inside of his pants leg to lodge itself in his left shoe. His train hurtles mercilessly towards Penn Station on a beleaguered trip to 34th Street to see the new Jeunet Film, Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles, (DVD July 12, distributed by Warner Bros). A ticket-taker shuffles slowly, painfully past and Andrea, his traveling companion for the day has just casually dropped a line about her nascent boyfriend, in the way that young gals always impart such important information as trains inexorably leave stations. Frank scribbles thoughts on the index cards he had brought in reservation for notes on the show. “Why don’t you go into the Village much?” She had asked, looking for a companion. “It’s a lonely place. The Village.” Frank responded, and could have said the same about Midtown, Downtown, Wall Street, Harlem, etc. The confab resulted in this misguided Valentine’s Day dinner and a movie. Eventually, though, Frank is in a darkened theatre in the East Village, minus thirty bucks: The film opens with five French soldiers in the WWI trenches of the Somme. All are charged with self-inflicted wounds in order to escape the madness and massacre. And as Frank considers gnawing off his own arm pinned closely to Andrea, the soldiers are marched into no-man’s land to take their chances in the crossfire. Meanwhile Audrey Tautou is Mathilde, the plucky, polio-stricken fiancée of the youngest of the condemned. Mathilde suspects that her betrothed, Manech, has survived. The story follows her attempts to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the execution-by-proxy of the condemned soldiers in a relentless attempt to locate Manech. The plot details are dense and one struggles to keep track of a lot of frenchies with mustaches, but Andrea does alternately laugh and cry throughout the whole three-hour show, and occasionally looks about the theatre, Frank suspects, for her own lost beau to make an appearance. But in the end, the endearing, often comic manner that is pure, classic Jeunet, schools Frank and Andrea in the arbitrariness of fate pitted against passion and determination. But make no mistake; the film is primarily a love story. A tearjerker. Not the kind of story Frank wants to take someone else’s gal to. Note here, though, that Jeunet’s art has “matured” in someway in his latest films, since the loss of collaborator Marco Caro (c.f. Delicatessen, 1991 and The City of Lost Children, 1995). Engagement and Amelie, both starring the Über-lovely Tautou, opposite Gaspard Ulliel and Mathieu Kassovitz, respectively, while retaining the often-dark whimsy of earlier Jeunet and Caro films, harkens to a distinct “mainstreaming” of beauty; whereas one once looked to their movies for a barrage of interesting yet loveable faces, the actors are now young and lovely, though still not as wooden-faced as typical Hollywood stars. Not to be too nay-saying: Jeunet’s usual troupe of actors do make their appearances, but with the great Dominique Pinon, continuing his slide from the lovable clown-hero of Delicatessen, now relegated to a senior role as Mathilde’s uncle. What stands out in Engagement, however, is the epic photography of the piece. Jeunet cannot be said to have ever squandered in terms of mise-en-scene (The City of Lost Children had the highest budget of any French film to that date). The camerawork is a brilliant juxtaposition of the harsh yellow-mud of the trenches and the warm sepias of Mathilde’s provincial world. On the whole the color processing has given the image a yellowed feel with dodged edges to evoke the idea of an old photo album. So, A Very Long Engagement is a must-see if you want need a weepy heart-on-sleeve romance. A must-see if you want photography of the utmost caliber. A must-see if you want to see computer film processing done to properly achieve dramatic effect. Definitely a must-see if you want a glimpse of Audrey Tautou’s derriere. (But don’t see it with a sister or platonic acquaintance.)However, The idea is that all art is subjective in meaning to its the audience and Frank is in a bad way, very resistant to happy ending. But great art is transcendent. For thee hours Frank was lifted from this bad place in a dank NYC theatre and sucked in to Mathilde’s lovelorn, exquisitely filmed plight. Rapt in beautiful images, artful tragedy, and the occasional off-handed chuckle—And then plopped right back into his train-wreck evening as the lights came up.