A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT ****
DIRECTED BY Jean-Pierre Jeunet
STARRING Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Ticky Holgado
France 2004 133 mins.
In French, with Greek and English subtitles.
A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD ***
DIRECTED BY Michael Mayer
STARRING Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Robin Wright Penn
US 2004 96 mins.
IT’S THE week of the Very Long Titles, but first we have to ask: Is Jean-Pierre Jeunet autistic? Those with fond memories of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988) will recall the basics of that condition: an obsession with repeating the same thing over and over; resistance to change, and a penchant for control-freak behaviour; an affinity with numbers – and symbols in general – rather than people; and of course a mania for collecting, whether it’s useless facts or useless trinkets, as befits a person trying to populate their private little world.
Much of this was present in Jeunet’s biggest hit, Amélie (2001), but offset (and humanised) by button-eyed Audrey Tautou as its winsome heroine; as for the earlier films – Delicatessen (1991) or The City of Lost Children (1995) – with their ornate, minutely-designed images … well, they were comic-book fantasy, where a certain amount of artistic autism comes with the territory. Now, however, in A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet’s trademark style bumps up against a subject too heart-wrenching and visceral to be ignored, the horrors of WW1 – and, after a slightly shaky start, fuses the raw (wartime drama) and over-cooked (elaborate visuals) in a weirdly compelling fantasia.
The plot is simple, following war widow Tautou as she tries to establish the fate of her beloved Manech, court-martialled and sent into no-man’s-land at the trench known as “Bingo Crepuscule”. Was he killed, as everyone keeps insisting? Or can Hope be allowed to flicker? Manech himself (Gaspard Ulliel) is almost immaterial: indeed, like previous Jeunet heroes, he’s a bit of a ‘holy fool’ – and you do wonder how much the director identifies with these male protagonists, Amélie’s guileless boyfriend or the circus clown pining for his chimp in Delicatessen; they seem not quite engaged with the world, drifting through, facing Good and Evil with the same incurious gaze.
Still, the boy is immaterial; what matters is the plot – the mystery itself – which grows and grows. As in Amélie, where a man was moved to tears by childhood mementos, everything starts with a box of old keepsakes: photos, a watch, an old letter. Jeunet is a collector, and the film avidly collects: people’s stories are amassed as Tautou and a private detective (the late Ticky Holgado, bowing out with a delightful performance) track down those who might know what happened. People themselves are ‘collected’, with each new arrival accompanied by a quick montage of that person’s life, just as Amélie began with its heroine’s own synopsis. Names are repeated, facts rehashed, stories seen from different angles; characters and settings – “Tina Lombardi”, “Bingo Crepuscule” – are invoked so often they take on a kind of magic, like a mantra or the words of a spell.
The film thrives on tension between repetition and its opposite, fragmentation. On the one hand, a postman is forever sliding on the gravel outside our heroine’s house, while her aunt repeats a bit of doggerel about “farting doggies”; Audrey herself mechanically mutters “Ashes to ashes” every time – and I mean every time – her dead parents are mentioned. On the other hand, the plot becomes more splintered as it goes along; things become unmoored, and lose their meanings. Words are ambiguous, like the private eye himself, M. Pire (‘Mr. Worse’) who claims to be “worse than a weasel” when it comes to his job. Letters turn out to be in code, while the lovers have their own code – three capital ‘M’s, the middle one also read as “aime” (i.e. ‘loves’).
For a while the film seems too clever, lost in its own puns and games. Slowly, however, oppressive style turns into a match for oppressive content. The full horror of the war becomes apparent – callous officers living large while their men fester in trenches, soldiers going ‘over the top’ to be mown down by machine-guns – a whole world coloured by destruction, what Sight & Sound calls “a plague of physical afflictions” (even our heroine has a limp from polio), blocking out hope just as the film’s outlandish tricks and unnatural colours – much of it sepia, like a yellowed photo – block out the hope of straightforward closure.
Jeunet’s autistic style erects a wall – but in this case the wall is poignant, because it stands between Tautou and the truth (Amélie was similar, but the stakes were lower). A kind of madness has often been appropriate for evoking War, and the weird obsessive quality of A Very Long Engagement piles up a sense of accumulated detail: like War itself, you feel there’s almost too much there for human comprehension. The effect is novelistic, and indeed the ending reminded me of a novel – Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans from a few years ago, another case of tentative, ambivalent happiness. The film is a labyrinth, and well worth getting lost in.
Alas, some will plump instead for Ladder 49, a thin and superficial tribute to brave firefighters (obviously made in the wake of 9/11); John Travolta seems a safer bet than a French movie with a cumbersome title – or indeed a little-known drama that’s only showing in one cinema (the Pantheon in Nicosia), even though A Home at the End of the World features the likes of Colin Farrell and Sissy Spacek.
I’ll be honest: I went into this without much enthusiasm, and may well have skipped it if I wasn’t being paid for this stuff. Yet it’s really quite special – not ‘good’ exactly, but nakedly sensitive in a way you don’t see very often (especially in Cyprus cinemas). Farrell overdoes the soft-spoken innocent – his eyebrows arch upwards in permanent Empathy Mode – and his adult self doesn’t seem to match his precocious teenage self, but he mostly succeeds in an unfamiliar role – and the film (perhaps inadvertently) catches something about the hemmed-in narcissism of ‘bohemian’ lives that Bertolucci never quite managed in The Dreamers, another film based around a young woman and two young men.
The young men are childhood friends, and in fact more than friends. The gay-sex quotient will scare off some viewers, and I’d be astonished if the writer wasn’t himself gay – actually it’s Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours – yet the tone is strangely wide-eyed, taking its cue from the first half-hour as our luckless hero tries to find his way through “this big beautiful noisy world”. It’s romantic in the way of stoned teenage poetry – two boys dancing on a rooftop, music as a force for hormonal longing (the film flaunts its soundtrack, from Laura Nyro to Leonard Cohen), bathed in a woozy, all-is-Love open-mindedness.
A Home at the End of the World turns into a paean for the Unconventional Family, indirectly touching on the gay-marriage debate in America; the semi-open ending leaves one character on the brink of AIDS but refuses to go further, as if to end on a last gasp of promiscuous youth (it’s set in the early 80s) before it all went wrong. The film has its problems – it’s maudlin, and often clumsy – but there’s more going on here emotionally than in Hitch or Ladder 49, and its people are people we’re not used to seeing onscreen. All human life may be found at the cinema this week, from sad-eyed bisexuals to (possibly) autistic French directors. No excuse for falling back on the tried and trusted.
NEW DVD RELEASES
Here’s our regular look at the more interesting titles released on DVD in the US and UK over the past few weeks. Some of t
hese may be available to rent from local video clubs, or you can always order over the Internet: dozens of suppliers, but http://www.amazon.com (for US) and http://www.sendit.com (for UK) are among the most reliable, albeit not the cheapest. Note that US discs are ‘Region 1’, and require a multi-region player.
NEW FILMS
WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW?!: How could a dramatised lecture on mysticism and science (featuring interviews with New Age authors and quantum physicists) turn into last year’s unlikeliest box-office hit? Only in America… [US]
CHURCHILL: THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS: Christian Slater as American GI named Winston Churchill in WW2 Britain; irreverent comedy includes deleted scenes, Churchill ‘mockumentary’ and more. [UK]
STAR WARS: CLONE WARS, VOL. 1: Looking forward to Revenge of the Sith? Whet your appetite with this Emmy-winning cartoon show, taking place between Episodes II and III. Includes an Xbox-playable demo of the stealth game Republic Commando! [US]
DEAD MAN’S SHOES: Powerful (and bloody) British thriller from respected director Shane Meadows. [UK]
OLD FILMS
EASTER PARADE (1948): Hollywood Musicals, Part 1: just too late for (non-Orthodox) Easter, it’s Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in their only teaming, backed by a joyous Irving Berlin score. 2-disc set includes commentary by Astaire’s daughter, documentaries and more. [US]
THE BAND WAGON (1953): Hollywood Musicals, Part 2: Astaire again in one of the great musicals, numbers including “That’s Entertainment” and “Dancing in the Dark”. Another 2-disc set, including deleted song “Two Faced Woman”. [US]
GASBAGS (1940): The rarest of birds: wartime English comedy, starring the so-called ‘Crazy Gang’. Also available is Gert and Daisy’s Weekend (1942), featuring music-hall duo Elsie and Doris Waters. [UK]
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (1991): Smart, hilarious nonsense, directed by Tom Stoppard from his play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as R&G. [US]
M.A.S.H. – SEASON 6: Ah, the memories… [UK]
