No Man's Land

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest is A Very Long Engagement. Jeunet will be most familiar here as the director of Alien 4, but has had bigger non-genre hits with Delicatessen and Amelie.

This tells the story of a girl played by Amelie’s Audrey Tautou who refuses to believe that her boyfriend has died in the WWI trenches, and sets out to find the full story. Like Jeunet’s previous movies, it’s a strange mix of Gallic humour and sentiment with big visuals and offbeat violence. The battle scenes are harrowing and unusual, and the post-war scenes are whimsical and poetic, leaving you wondering who the movie is aimed at, but it’s a beautifully made movie, even if the end is inevitable and it takes forever getting there.

Jodie Foster makes a very odd cameo appearance and the rest of the cast is composed of familiar faces from French cinema. The extras on the DVD are probably among the best I’ve seen and I can recommend this DVD to anyone, even the most cynical among you. Au revoir!

Mild Peril Rating:

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Tags: Euro