A Very Long Engagement

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A Very Long Engagement
"A Very Long Engagement" film poster
Directed by	Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Produced by	Francis Boespflug Bill Gerber Jean-Louis Monthieux Fabienne Tsaï
Written by	Sébastien Japrisot (novel), Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillaume Laurant
Starring	Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Jodie Foster Marion Cotillard, Dominique Pinon, Chantal Neuwirth, André Dussolier, Ticky Holgado
Music by	Angelo Badalamenti
Cinematography	Bruno Delbonnel
Distributed by	Warner Independent Pictures
Release date(s)	October 27, 2004
Running time	133 min
Language	French

A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) is a novel by Sebastien Japrisot, on which a 2004 film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and distributed by Warner Bros. is based. It is a fictional tale about a young woman's desperate search for her fiancé who might have been killed on a World War I battlefield (the Somme).

The film's tagline is "Never let go."

1 Plot introduction
2 Cast
3 Other crew
4 Controversy
5 Awards and nominations
6 Notes
7 External links

[edit] Plot introduction

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Five soldiers are convicted of self-mutilation in order to escape military service during World War I. They are condemned to face near certain death in the no man's land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but the fiancée of one of the soldiers refuses to give up hope, and begins to uncover clues as to what actually took place on the battlefield. The story is told both from the point of view of the fiancée in Paris and the French countryside - mostly Brittany - of the 1920s, and in flashback to the battlefield.

[edit] Cast

Audrey Tautou - Mathilde
Gaspard Ulliel - Manech Langonnet, Mathilde's fiancé
Jean-Pierre Becker - Lieutenant Esperanza
Dominique Bettenfeld - Ange Bassignano
Clovis Cornillac - Benoît Notre-Dame
Marion Cotillard - Tina Lombardi
Jean-Pierre Darroussin - Corporal Benjamin Gordes, aka. Biscotte
Julie Depardieu - Véronique Passavant
Jean-Claude Dreyfus - Commandant Lavrouye
André Dussollier - Pierre-Marie Rouvières
Ticky Holgado - Germain Pire
Tchéky Karyo - Captain Favourier
Jérôme Kircher - Bastoche
Denis Lavant - Six-Sous
Chantal Neuwirth - Bénédicte, Mathilde's aunt
Dominique Pinon - Sylvain, Mathilde's uncle
Albert Dupontel - Célestin Poux
Jodie Foster - Élodie Gordes

[edit] Other crew

Original music: Angelo Badalamenti

[edit] Controversy

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The "nationality" of the film has been of some controversy. French films are subsidized by the government through the Centre National de la Cinématographie, and the filmmakers applied for a US$4.3 million grant. However, rival filmmakers complained that the film should not receive the subsidy because it is not a true French film, given most of the funding for its US$55 million cost came from Warner Bros.

[edit] Awards and nominations

The film was nominated for two Oscars, but did not win one. It was not eligible for the Best Foreign-Language Film award.

[edit] Notes

The initials MMM are carved several times by Manech, the fiancé of the heroine Mathilde. They stand for "Manech aime Mathilde", "Manech loves Mathilde". This is a pun: in French the word "aime" ("loves") is pronounced very similarly as the letter M. In the English subtitles, the initials were preserved by substituting the wording "Manech's Marrying Mathilde".

The Albatross aircraft featured was actually an American Stearman, as flying Albatrosses are no longer to be found.

[edit] External links

Feature films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Delicatessen (with Marc Caro, 1991) • The City of Lost Children (with Marc Caro, 1995) • Alien: Resurrection (1997) • Amélie (2001) • A Very Long Engagement (2004)