A Very Long Engagement (2004)

There is a temptation, when confronted with a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, to surrender to the whimsy and let the ledger go unexamined. We resist. A Very Long Engagement arrives from 2004, adapted from Sébastien Japrisot's 1991 novel, and concerns Mathilde, a polio survivor with a cane and a limp who refuses to accept the official account of her fiancé's death in the trenches. Audrey Tautou, working with the same director who made her a pixie of Montmartre, here spends most of the runtime limping through Brittany and Paris, interrogating survivors, hiring a private detective, and assembling a truth the French military would prefer remain buried. It is a handsomely mounted picture, all amber light and mud, and it takes the corruption of wartime tribunals seriously enough to hang a plot upon it.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a quiet specimen. Mathilde's disability is treated with a matter-of-factness that predates the current enthusiasm for such casting, and she is allowed to be desirable, stubborn, and sexually alive without a speech attached. The cast, however, is uniformly white and French, which reflects the demographics of 1920s rural France and not any deliberate exclusion. There is no racial consciousness here, no environmental sermon, no queer subtext, no examination of neurodiversity. Manech's amnesia is a wound of war, not a diagnosis. The film's anger is aimed squarely at military bureaucracy, which is not the same as an indictment of capital, and its feminist energy resides entirely in one woman's refusal to be told what happened to the man she loves. That is devotion, not a thesis.

The picture lectures no one. It shows a tribunal, a firing detail, a widow's grief, and lets the audience draw the conclusion unaided. This restraint is increasingly rare and should be noted with the gravity it deserves. A sommelier would call this vintage restrained, earthy, faintly romantic, and entirely untroubled by the anxieties of a later decade.