People are voting emotionally.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

A Very Long Engagement is a French romantic war film, directed by Jean- Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou. It is a fictional tale about a young woman's desperate search for her fiancé who might have been killed in the Battle of the Somme, during World War I. It was based on a novel of the same name, written by Sebastien Japrisot.Mathilde is a pretty but frail young women who was left with a bad leg after a childhood bout with polio. Mathilde lives in a small French village with her Aunt Bénédicte and Uncle Sylvain, and is engaged to marry Manech, the son of a lighthouse keeper who is fighting with the army near the German front. Manech is one of five soldiers who have been accused of injuring themselves in order to be sent home; in order to discourage similar behavior among their comrades, Manech and the other soldiers are sentenced to death, and the condemned men are marched into the no man's land between the French and German lines, where they are certain to be killed. Mathilde receives word of Manech's death, but in her heart she believes that if the man she loved had been killed, she would know it and feel it. Convinced he's still alive somewhere, Mathilde hires a private detective shortly after the end of the war, and together they set out to find the missing Manech.A Very Long Engagement is Jeunet's most accomplished effort- if not necessarily by far, given his illustrious filmography- because it crosses the barrier between his world and invades ours.Also, it's a romantic epic, an intense and gripping look at World War I, and a nifty little mystery-quest all rolled into one movie.And finally,it also characterized by great performances especially Tautou, who as always, makes this an enchanting and grand French cinema.

Audrey Tautou proves once again that she is one of the very few actresses alive able to carry a film on her shoulders. As Mathilde, a twenty year old young lady, determined to prove her fiancé is alive, after hearing that he has died during a battle as a French soldier with Germans, she spends all of her time and most of her money on that mission.Manech is one of five soldiers sentenced to death during World War I, and while a bloody battle in a trench surrounds a chaotic situation, an officer comes up with the idea to set the five condemned men to walk out towards the Germans on the other side of the fire fight. The rest of the story alternates between war scenes and a mystery led by Mathilde and a detective she has hired to find Manech, who she believes to the point of obsession, is alive. The story is a puzzle, which deserves complete attention from the viewer. Tautou is so compelling and believable as the woman in love, that I could watch her read from a phone book, and never lose interest. The script is excellent and the sets exquisite, and director Jean Pierre Jeunet's eye for detail is perfect. A Very Long Engagement is a very good movie.

Exceptional beauty and harrowing emotion are what bring A Very Long Engagement to life. It's a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film set in France in 1920, just after World War I. Audrey Tatou plays Mathilde, a young woman whose fiancé was lost in the trenches and now she has made it her goal to find out about his whereabouts, and she was stop at nothing. She leads her own personal investigation, meeting many different people who all have their own stories along the way. Each new story brings Mathilde closer and closer to discovering what truly happened to her fiancé. And each new story offers insight from a variety of perspectives, giving the film's narrative a sort of Rashomon feel to it. But underneath it is a truly sincere and heart wrenching story of true love and what it can motivate a person to do.A Very Long Engagement is an absolutely beautiful film. Anyone who says otherwise has a very weak perception of true art. Jeunet does marvelous things with the camera and his cinematographers works wonders with the color schemes and visual nuances of the films two polar opposite settings. We have the trenches of WWI which look cold, grey, and very bleak. Then we have the glorious side of France including the great city of 1920's Paris, and the luscious French countryside, all washed over with a warm and hopeful sepia overtone. Yet both settings are very polished and very clean. Even the grittiness of WWI has a sort of smooth spectacle to it, giving the entire film a consistently artistic look. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that this film is most certainly European, and very, very French.But the beauty of the film doesn't end with its stupendous aesthetic quality. It continues into the emotionally exceptional story that is told through a variety of fascinating characters and all is told through a most sincere emotional eye. The narrative of the film works brilliantly in bringing the story together. It's a mystery that unfolds in the most lusciously refined way; an investigation that develops on top of the polished and golden glowing set pieces. The film lags a little bit through the middle, and some of it becomes redundant, but as a whole the plot is true art through storytelling that maybe could have just been a little shaved down.All in all A Very Long Engagement is an excellent film. It will satisfy an open minded audience and treat the artistic eye to something very special. It's a film that finds beauty in the strangest of places, and it is truly amazing how we can find heart and emotion on the cold and barren fields of no-man's land. A Very Long Engagement is incredibly well done and is a true work of art.

I'm pretty hard to please when it comes to film so I am so pleased that French cinema exists. I just can't even watch Hollywood films anymore. They are even contriving 'indie' films now, and the soul has been relentlessly driven out of everything that issues forth so that the best of it is just not too trite and sentimental. When a French film is sentimental it actually brings tears to your eyes. This film is about a lot of things; the imagined innocence of childhood; the reality of growing up; the kindness of strangers; the tragedy and pain of happiness ripped away. We peep over the shoulder of our protagonist, praying for her hopes to be realised but wanting to say to her 'I'm sorry my little one, so sorry ,but life must go on' In the midst of it all, the barbarity and corruption of War-its utter pointlessness and criminality. We see the damage it does to all the humans involved; there are no heroes involved, just real human lives being torn to shreds. And what else? Ah yes. Poignancy, humour and life.