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A Very Long Engagement

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A Very Long Engagement (French: Un long dimanche de fiançailles) is a novel by Sebastien Japrisot, first published in 1993. It is a fictional tale about a young woman's desperate search for her fiancé who might have been killed on a World War I battlefield (the Somme). Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed a 2004 film of the same name based on the novel.

A Very Long Engagement
"A Very Long Engagement" film poster
Directed byJean-Pierre Jeunet
Written bySébastien Japrisot (novel),
Jean-Pierre Jeunet,
Guillaume Laurant
Produced byFrancis Boespflug
Bill Gerber
Jean-Louis Monthieux
Fabienne Tsaï
StarringAudrey Tautou,
Gaspard Ulliel,
Jodie Foster
Marion Cotillard,
Dominique Pinon,
Chantal Neuwirth,
André Dussolier,
Ticky Holgado
CinematographyBruno Delbonnel
Music byAngelo Badalamenti
Distributed byWarner Independent Pictures
Release dates
October 27, 2004
Running time
133 min
LanguageFrench

The film's tagline is "Never let go."

Plot introduction

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Five soldiers are convicted of self-mutilation in order to escape military service during World War I. They are condemned to face near certain death in the no man's land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but the fiancée of one of the soldiers refuses to give up hope, and begins to uncover clues as to what actually took place on the battlefield. The story is told both from the point of view of the fiancée in Paris and the French countryside - mostly Brittany - of the 1920s, and in flashback to the battlefield.

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Cast

Other crew

Controversy

The "nationality" of the film has been of some controversy. French films are subsidized by the government through the Centre National de la Cinématographie, and the filmmakers applied for a US$4.3 million grant. However, rival filmmakers complained that the film should not receive the subsidy because it is not a true French film, given most of the funding for its US$55 million cost came from Warner Bros. But the NATIONALITY of this movie originally belongs to the FRENCH country. As the cast and the crew of the movie were FRENCH, that's why it was a FRENCH movie but many people still disagree to this fact and say that the revenue and the earnings were given to WARNER BROS.(US).

Awards and nominations

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction and Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the Oscars. However, it was not selected by the French government as the French submission for the award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Notes

  • The initials MMM are carved several times by Manech, the fiancé of the heroine Mathilde. They stand for "Manech aime Mathilde", "Manech loves Mathilde". This is a pun: in French the word "aime" ("loves") is pronounced very similarly as the letter M. In the English subtitles, the initials were preserved by substituting the wording "Manech's Marrying Mathilde".
  • The Albatross aircraft featured was actually an American Stearman, as flying Albatrosses are no longer to be found.
  • The English translation of the title creates a pun, possibly unintentionally. Engagement could refer either to the marriage of Manech and Mathilde or could refer to the military engagement.
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