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A very long engagement

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Jean-Pierre Jeunet

A very long engagement

Produzent: Bill Gerber & Jean-Louis Monthieux

Gesehen: 2005

Audrey Tatou plays Mathilde, a young woman who, in 1920, doesn't want to believe that her lover is dead, and starts to search for witnesses of his death or escape among war veterans.

Her lover, Manech, served at the frontline in the trenches, and he was shot in the hand by the enemy, but since he provoked that shot, he was court-martialed and sentenced to death for self-mutilation together with four other french soldiers. However, the last thing that many witnesses saw was that the convicted soldiers were sent unarmed into enemy territory by a ruthless officer.

While Mathilde (who is slightly disabled from Polio, which she had had as a girl) searches for the truth, stories from the war in the trenches unfold - a dreadful, dirty war, like in "Nothing New from the West". In a town near the trenches, she meets the sister of a German soldier (who has witnessed how Manech had been shot by a German aeroplane, but also that he was only wounded) and learns that it was the same on the other side.

She learns that he was shot by that aeroplane, that everybody assumed him dead because "you can't survive that sort of wound", that a dead soldier was found with Manech's identity tag later, but still nobody could confirm that it was acutally Manech. She visits his grave, and still continues with her search. And in the end, she learns what really happened, who among the convicts died, and who survived. She also learns that President Poincare (a second degree nephew of famous scientist Henri Poincare) has pardoned the five convicts, but that a brutal officer had destroyed the pardon.

Mathilde is a lot like Amelie, a beautiful, determined, but lonely and slightly depressed woman. Audrey Tatou is really cute. Like Amelie, I've watched that movie in French with subtitles. I didn't understand as much of the French as in Amelie - probably in war time, people speak faster.

And there are a lot of sad and funny absurd scenes in the movie. Seems that is a must for french movies. I wonder who had the idea to put an infirmary into the hangar of a (hydrogen-filled) blimp. And whoever read "Asterix on Corsica" should recognize some of the scenes of the movie that play on Corsica.

I think I'm going to watch out for more Jeunet/Tatou movies.

Mehr Filme mit Audrey Tautou

Film: Amelie

Film: A very long engagement


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