Surrendering to Love

JEUNET'S JOURNEY OF HEART AND TRUTH

Here's an idea that really shouldn't have worked: combine the romantic whimsy of Amelie with the literal gut-wrenching of _post-Saving Private Ryan war movies. The result is A Very Long Engagement, a film in which shy young lovers frolic in almost too picturesque lighthouses while soldiers are accessorized with their comrades' pulped viscera. This may sound infelicitous and, in terms of any potential audience, demographically baffling (a chick flick with imploding helmets?), but somehow, on-screen, it gels—as people in sports say, there's a reason they play the games. The director is Amelie's Jean-Pierre Jeunet, re-teaming with the kewpie-faced Audrey Tautou, who apparently receives the call when producers scream, "Get me a Genevieve Bujold type!" The film, which tells the story of a soldier who may or may not have been killed during World War I, and of the fiancee who won't let him go, is less concerned with combat than it is with the perseverance of true love against awful odds. That's a sentimental notion, of course, but great pop artists—and Jeunet is one—know how to imbue sentimentality with mythic force. Now, if someone could just get the fetching Tautou, who clomped through Amelie wearing Dr. Martens-style clodhoppers and is here saddled with an orthopedic boot, into a nice pair of mules. (Rating: ★★★)

B. H.