A Very Long Engagement

A Very Long Engagement, 134min, French
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

I watched it at GV Marina, the best place to catch such an art-house piece. The time was 2355, after a week of sleep depravation, it was quite surprising I still had the enegy to finish this movie without catching the sleep bug.

What I thought before watching the movie...

My friend wanted to watch a movie, but there isn't anything halfway decent in cinemas lately. You won't see me stepping a foot in a theatre marked Son of the Mask, or anything just as lame. A Very Long Engagement is French, and an art-house piece, so naturally, it is held in higher regard than any Hollywood pathetics. After reading the film's intro, I got the idea that it was a romance film, I thought that it was the kind of teary, I love you but you are going to the war kind of sad sad movie. And because the title of the film is A Very Long Engagement, instead of like A Terminated Engagement, I thought that would have a crying happy ending.

Well, the feeling I got after watching the show is totally different.

A Very Long Engagement is a World War I film. With a romantic story weaved in between. It is also a mystery film and a humorous one. It's a story of survival, hope, love and life. My kind of 5-star movie, and the best movie I've watched so far this year, but then again, maybe that's because the movies I've watched so far are those well, more of entertaining kinda movies.

I was totally blown over in the beginning when the movie opened in a war trench and the trudging of the soldiers, from that moment onwards, I knoew that this was so going to be a great movie. Even though this was a French movie, and the enemy was the Germans. I thought I knew all about WWI having studied it repeatedly every year and am still studying different ascpects of it now, but I didn't know anything about self-multilation as a war crime, until I watched the movie. Apparantly, many soldiers were so sick of war that they actually attempt to make use of a clause to injure themselves so that they can be discharged from the battlefield. With so many soldiers doing it, it was made into a crime to do it, and the soldiers who self-multilated were given death sentences, some of these death sentences were either throwing them into the no man's land, or deploying them to the front line, so they would get killed by the enemy.

War changes people.
When you finally meet death right in your face, your perception of life will totally change, your priorities will change too. That was what I always believe. Although I'm a patriotic freak, I understand that some people cannot react to death and the only thing they want to do is to escape from it. It's understandable that those soldiers wanted to seek out with self-multilation.

Mathilde.
Before the movie, I thought that she was just a French girl, passionate about love and loves her man dearly, well, after watching, she wasn't just any French girl, she was a polio girl, so determined with her passion. Her single-minded focis on hope just makes me feel so miniatured. Yeah, sometimes all you need is hope. This was in the context of the night before, when yet again I bought another piece of hope, but for me, my hope was burst so unmercifully. Should I continue to raise more hopes? I really don't know. I don't have the resolute of Mathilde.

It was the mystery twist in the film that made this a truly enjoyable film to watch. It injected humour and opmh into the whole show. It traces the pieces of evidence Mathilde collected from her investigations of the troop of her fiance, and the 5 men who were convicted for self-multilation. A number of times, she was thrown off course, but with several twist and turns she got back on trail, and with strokes of luck, intellect and determination, she finally uncovered the truth behind the mystery.

Another thing I like about this movie is the depiction of the encounters of the other soldiers who along with Manech, Mathilde's fiance, and their life backgrounds. Their life backgrounds provided some comic relief and humour in a stoic war film, while their encounters made it more stoic that this was indeed a war film.

After reading Elie Wiesel's Night last semester, I always thought war made people selfish, and brings out the most primate ature of man, well, it wasn't that true after this movie. Yes, some people were selfish, like the husband who wanted his wife to make love with his best friend just so that she could have another kid so that he'd be a father of 6 and not need to serve the war, but there are also instances of brotherhood. Through helping others you keep yourself from losing your sanity.

But I think Mathilde is lucky. Although she's an orphan, her uncle and aunt treat her very well and was very supportive of her in her quest. I don't think at that point in time many people can be so supportive when it seemed almost certain that Manech was dead. Another thing is that although she wasn't rich, she was reasonable well off, in that she was able to pay for her expenses when she when on the search trail, or her hiring of a private investigator to help her. She was also able to pull strings to get into the national archives and look and war records. But what surprised me was that her uncle owned an automobile, well, that makes things very easy, isn't it? She's lucky...

*disclaimer: spoilers ahead*

Well, Manech is also one lucky guy. Even though it was the kind of crying happy ending where the male returns from the dead to give a big hug to the female, she's very lucky to have him back alive. Just give him more time and everything can be well again.