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In Reply to: A Very Long Engagement posted by townsend on December 27, 2004 at 20:36:58:
A Very Long Engagement. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's visualization of a novel by Sebastien Japrisot, a name firmly entrenched in the mystery and suspense genres: The Sleeping-Car Murders, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, One Deadly Summer, others. While I have read much of his genre work, and with much pleasure, this one has eluded me. It is plainly in the grips of a greater ambition, a WWI-period romance about a tuba-playing, polio- crippled cutie (Audrey Tautou), pounding the trail of her soul mate (Gaspard Ulliel) who vanished on the front lines at the quaintly named bunker of Bingo Crepuscule. So, there's still a mystery element in it, and even a professional detective (not one to inspire much confidence), but the overriding feeling of the thing is expansively, unconstrainedly "novelistic," with scraps of information gathered willy-nilly from different time zones and a narrator to fill in the gaps. Neither the pet composition -- giant faces floating in front of a blurred background on a convex canvas -- nor the monochromatic, butterscotchy color manages to redeem the film as cinematic. (Though the first shot, of a broken Christ hanging from a cross by one hand, is a grabber.) The scrambled structure never quite enables you to believe in the Great Love or to follow the train of detection. And the winkingly tall-tale tone disengages you to the point of uninterest.Duncan Shepherd
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- My fave critic on the topic - clarkjohnsen 14:31:01 12/28/04 (0)
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