In 2001, Jean Pierre Jeunet's Amelie turned out to be an unexpected, joyous salve in a world gone suddenly wrong. It was made before September 11, and its blissful worldview proved reassuring and intoxicating by the time it reached our shores in the fall. Now, two years later, he and the girl he made a star, Audrey Tautou, are back again with a film that is very much a product of the time that has passed since Amelie. To wit: I saw A Very Long Engagement on the fateful morning of November 3rd, and could not separate the political climate from what was happening on screen. This film takes place in France during World War I, and it is virulently (and violently) anti-war; it is a war film made by a romantic who seems almost disheartened by his subject matter. Perhaps that's why the film ultimately doesn't soar the way one might expect; no lead wings can lighten the load of its subject matter.

The film begins in the French trenches, as five soldiers are lead through through the dirt and the mud by their superior officer. All five have been arrested for injuring themselves to get out of fighting, and the understanding is that they've been sentenced to death by firing squad. We're reminded instantly of Kubrick's Paths Of Glory, as interpreted by a director who can't be troubled to keep his camera weighted by gravity or his narrative bound by forward progression. We receive a rapid recount of each of the soldier's lives, their loves and losses; we remember such this technique from Amelie, but these, it will turn out, are slightly more important than brief diversions. The last one, in fact, which concerns a young orphan soldier named Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), is the springboard for the entire film.

But before the film can truly begin, Manech must disappear. Unlike the tyrannical commanding officers in Paths Of Glory who forced Kirk Douglas to execute his men, there is dissension amongst these French soldiers. Disgusted at the army's lack of compassion, they feed the five soldiers and then let them climb out of the trenches into no man's land. There, they will be surely killed by the Germans on the opposite side of the battlefield -- and, it seems, they all are. But at least they had a chance, and that their comrades risk their own safety to give it to them is touching.

Jeunet then leaves the battlefield and turns to a farm by the seaside, where a polio-stricken girl named Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) climbs into bed and tells herself that if her dog doesn't come into her room before she is called to dinner, than Manech must be dead. She's his fiancee, and though she's been given word of his death, she's convinced that she's been misinformed. Like Amelie was fond of doing, she puts her trust in the whimsy of fate; and indeed, her dog hops onto her bed just before her uncle (Jeunet mainstay Dominique Pinon) tells her it's time to eat.

Thus begins a story that is not entirely unlike that of Cold Mountain, in which a young woman believes against all hope that her soldier boy will return to her; like Cold Mountain, there is a bit of a problem in sustaining a sense passion between two people who remain consistently apart. There are flashbacks, of course, in which it is revealed that Manech and Mathilde have been in love since childhood, when he carried her to the top of their town's lighthouse. In that same lighthouse they made love for the first time, and it is there that Mathilde goes each day to wait and play mournful notes on her tuba (the kind of odd detail Jeunet loves to include), until she finally decides she's had it with waiting and goes off to look for Manech herself.

The form of the film eventually becomes a Rashomon-type mystery, in which the clues to Manech's fate lie in the memories of the soldiers who were there the day he was climbed over the trenches. Some saw him shot down and die; others are not so sure, and we see the same events many times over, from various points of view. The wives of the other condemned men, including one played by Jodie Foster (speaking French so well that she'll make you forget she ever spoke English at all), have their own tales to tell. And then there's the mysterious Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard), a prostitute who is murdering French soldiers one by one for reasons that mat not entirely be unrelated to Manech and his lot.

It all gets very complex, as all the conflicting stories and coincidental discoveries are laid on in increasingly thicker layers, and eventually neither Tautou's intoxicating optimism (which is directly related to her equally intoxicating beauty) nor Jeunet's swirling visuals can convince us that this is a quest terribly worth continuing. A large part of the problem is that there is just not much palpable passion between Mathilde and Manech. Tautou pines beautifully, but Ulliel doesn't have a whole lot to do; in most of his limited screentime, he comes off a bit too simpleminded. I think it might have been beneficial if Jeunet had cast the romantic lead of Amelie, Matthieu Kassovitz, in the role (especially since just about every other actor from Amelie gets their own moment to shine her); the wonderful chemistry he shared with Tautou would have naturally carried over into this film, even though they're playing different characters. As it is, we believe Mathilde and Manech love each other simply because we must if we're going to watch the film; but we do not feel it.

Perhaps the story's epic qualities dwarf the romance as well. The most memorable moments are the simple and intimate ones; Manech feeling Mathilde's heart beat beneath her breast, or Mathilde accompanying a soldier back to the fateful battleground, which is now grown so lush with daisies that he does not recognize it. Memorable too is the compassion of the soldiers in the barracks, particularly the cook who claims he would kill his mother to give a condemned man one last cup of hot chocolate. That sentiment, set against the horror and futility of a terrible war, is representative of one shared by all the soldiers in the film, and whose weight overpowers the love between the two lead characters. I imagine that's why Jeunet ends the film the way he does: not with an exhilarating reunion and a sudden swell of Angelo Badalamenti's score, but a glance and a smile, and a quiet and comforting sense of relief. After all the fighting and death, that's all that is needed; there's time enough for passionate embraces later, but this is not that film.

Next up is a the polar opposite of Jeunet's film -- a minor epic that has been traveling around the world on the festival circuit and wining awards, and which will be hitting DVD early in 2005. More importantly, it'll be playing in Los Angeles the first week of December. It's called:

PRISON-A-GO-GO