Mmmmmm, cheesecake!

Not that I've ever needed an excuse to post some glamour shots, but with Audrey Tautou, Gillian Anderson, Anna Kendrick and Rhona Mitra sharing a birthday today, it would be almost immoral not to.

A Very Long Engagement

France, the First World War. Five soldiers are court-marshalled for perpetrating self-inflicted wounds in an attempt to get sent home. Among them is Manchen Langonnet (Gaspard Ulliel). Instead of a firing squad, they are sent over the top to almost certain death in no-man’s-land.

After the war, Manech’s fiancée Mathilde (Audrey Tautou), to whom he became engaged just before he was called up and who has never believed the official account of his death, engages a lawyer and a private detective – before, frustrated with their lack of progress, taking up the investigation herself – to discover the truth.

As she uncovers information about the other four men, she crosses paths with the vengeful Tina (Marion Cotillard), herself betrothed to one of the accused, and makes a discovery that both shocks her and redoubles her faith that Manech is alive.

As Bryce commented in his article on ‘Foutaises’, there are two schools of thought regarding Jeunet. One has it that he’s a genius; the other that it was his former partner Marc Caro who brought the innovative and creative brilliance while Jeunet was an adept frontman who was good with actors. ‘Amelie’ provides an emphatic and pretty much inarguable “not guilty” plea. ‘A Very Long Engagement’, however, goes some way to establishing a case for the prosecution.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a bad film. In fact, it’s handsomely mounted, beautifully designed, suitably sweeping in scope and length (at 127 minutes, it’s Jeunet’s longest outing) and never less than watchable. Which is part of the problem. It falls into the trap that most romantic dramas set against a backdrop of war fall into during the opening credits and never get out of. The phrase “romantic drama set against a backdrop of war” ought to tell you all you need to know.

It’s Oscar-bait. Or Cesar-bait. Whichever, it’s lush and beautiful and has a handful of scenes which comment on The Futility Of War. These are obligatorily juxtaposed with a handful scenes which swooningly affirm that Love Conquers Everything. The period recreation is lovingly nostalgic. The production design makes your average box of Belgian chocolates look diabetic. It’s something to be thankful for, amidst all this, that David Lynch regular Angelo Badalamenti composed the score and not John Williams!

All told, ‘A Very Long Engagement’ comes on like some lost David Lean epic, only in French and clocking it at less than four hours. And I reiterate: it’s neither badly done nor a waste of two hours. It’s just a very ordinary piece of work from a director renowned for his inspired quirkiness. True, there are plenty of idiosyncratic touches (Mathilde communicating her depressive moods by monotonously playing one note on the tuba; a running joke about a postman disturbing a gravelled pathway; a couple of bizarro no-man’s-land scenes that play more like ‘Abbott and Costello’ than ‘King and Country’) that remind you who’s calling the shots, but on the whole Jeunet plays it safe with the material.

Which, to be fair, was kind of inevitable; with a budget of over $56 million, the production required the backing of Warner Bros. It was never going to be ‘The City of Lost Children Part II’.

That ‘A Very Long Engagement’ would emerge as a Jeunet project was also kind of inevitable; after ‘Amelie’, a second collaboration between Jeunet and Tautou was a given. Part of the attraction (and equally part of the problem) is how different a character Mathilde is from Amelie. And, yes, Tautou gets to demonstrate her range. But Mathilde – her leg crippled from polio, her brow etched with a frown of determination, her resolve steely – isn’t the most captivating heroine to spend two hours with. Nor does the architecture of the narrative give her much to do but receive letters, make phone calls, stare moodily out of the window during train journeys and badger supporting characters (who are invariably more interesting) with a barrage of expositionally-designed questions.

The film massively perks up (as well as shooting itself in the foot eminently more successfully than Manech or any of his comrades in arms) with the introduction of Tina. As portrayed by the dangerously desirable Cotillard, Tina is pro-active where Mathilde is re-active; seducer where Mathilde is sleuth. She’s the thinking man’s femme fatale, the vamp de luxe, the good time girl gone bad and with good reason. ‘A Very Long Engagement’ smoulders into life whenever she’s on screen.

“We’ve been conducting the same investigation,” Tina tells Mathilde during her final scene (which comes about two thirds of the way through the movie and marks the point at which things settle back into inertia) and the thought springs unstoppably into your mind: yeah – and the filmmakers have been telling the wrong story!

Am I being too hard on ‘A Very Long Engagement’? Maybe so; I seem to have spent 800 words carping about a film I actually quite like. It’s just very difficult to shake the fact that Jeunet’s serving up safe, generic, inoffensive Sunday afternoon TV when – even in the most whimsically romantic moments of ‘Amelie’ – his talent has always been better applied to the subversive.

PERSONAL FAVES: Amelie

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Eurovisions (France) / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 42 of 100

Montmartre, the present. Twenty-something Amelie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) works as a waitress and lives in the world of her imagination, a result of a childhood spent with her emotionally inexpressive father and deprived of close friends because of a misdiagnosed medical condition. She’s not doing too well on the relationships front.

The accidental discovery of a tin box filled with childhood mementoes leads Amelie on a search for a previous resident of her apartment. She contrives to return it to him while preserving her anonymity and is delighted with his poignant response. Amelie reinvents herself as a do-gooder and match-maker, with some early success.

It’s when she encounters the enigmatic Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz) that Amelie realises she’s been neglecting her own life and happiness. She comes into possession of a scrapbook which Nino drops – full of reassembled photographs torn up and left at passport photo booths on stations – and notices that one face, ghost-like, appears time and time again.

Amelie uses the book and its curious contents to track down Nino, inadvertently solving the identity of the mystery man in the process …

‘Amelie’ is a masterpiece.

Two years ago, in a review of Powell and Pressburger’s ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (an ethereal and enchanting romantic fantasy that is, in certain ways, the spiritual forebear of ‘Amelie’), I chanced a definition of art. I was a pretentious little sod back then.

This was my definition: “A true work of art functions, equally and simultaneously, on an aesthetic, intellectual and emotional level, the cumulative effect being the betterment of those who experience it.”

I believed (and still believe) that this is absolutely true of ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. I believe it is equally true of ‘Amelie’. It’s an aesthetically gorgeous movie that delivers a heady onrush of emotional satisfaction while having the intelligence (and a soupçon of dark humour) to steer clear of outright emotional manipulation or cloying sentimentality.

‘Amelie’ is also incredibly cleverly constructed, more so than a first viewing would have you believe. On the surface ‘Amelie’ seems to be an exercise in non-narrative, flitting between serio-comic situations and playfully eccentric characters with such butterfly-like charm that it would be bad sportsmanship to probe the soufflé-light edifice of it too deeply or critically.

After enough viewings (I’m significantly into the double figures), the structural intricacy gradually becomes apparent. As does the depth of characterization. Take the scenes from Amelie’s childhood, a whistlestop montage of nostalgia, backstory and craftily delivered exposition. Amelie is socially awkward because she lives in a dreamworld. This is because she lived alone with her father following the freak confluence of circumstances that caused her mother’s demise (I’ll leave the mechanics of it under wraps; let’s just say it’s way funnier than it has any right to be) and had no real friends. This is because she was thought to have a heart condition and was kept at home. Which in turn is because the only time Amelie’s father paid her any attention was when he performed a medical check-up, including listening to her heartbeat through a stethoscope. Delighted at the attention, her heart beats faster in anticipation. Her father worries that it’s a bad sign, conducting check-ups more frequently; Amelie, associating them with the attention that is otherwise denied her, feigns illness.

Or, to put it in mawkish terms, Amelie’s social ineptitude and lack of emotional fulfillment in adulthood owes to her desperation for her father’s love as a child. Seriously, how puke-making does that make it sound? Can you imagine how that scenario would work in an American mainstream movie? It’d be like ‘Terms of Endearment’, ‘Sophie’s Choice’, ‘Who Will Love My Children’ and ‘Steel Magnolias’ all thrown into a blender with added saccharine; watching it would be like drowning in a vat of syrup. John Williams would pull out all the stops for the soundtrack. The amount of vibrato would cause earthquakes. Can you imagine it done in a rom-com? It would ravage the rom and kill the com!

Now here’s the way Jean-Pierre Jeunet does it: a few lines of droll (almost throwaway) voiceover, a handful of quirky images, no dwelling on the backstory or milking of the emotions, and hey presto here’s another scene and some more deliriously offbeat characters and frame upon frame of images so lovingly rendered you could hit the pause button at random and just stare in complete gratitude at the screen.

Or take the effortless way Amelie’s search for the owner of the tin box sets up the supporting cast, all of whom eventually benefit (to a greater or lesser degree) from Amelie’s do-gooding. And here, ironically, is where Jeunet and his co-scripter Guillaume Laurant infuse the proceedings with the odd shadowy reminder that not all is sweetness and light. There’s Amelie’s revenge on Collignon (Urbair Cancelier), a bad-tempered grocer who comes across as a cinematic second cousin of Clapet in ‘Delicatessen’, for mistreating his educationally-challenged assistant Lucien (Jamel Debbouze). Sure, Collignon deserves it … but, man, does Amelie pull some nasty shit on him, reducing the man to a terrified, gibbering wreck.

Then there’s her well-meaning but emotionally and morally questionable duping of Madeleine (Yolande Moreau), a widow pining for the husband who died in a plane crash. Madeleine has spent years pouring over his letters and perpetuating a monumental case of denial. Although common knowledge that he’d left her for another woman, Madeleine tells herself that he was on the verge of returning to her. Amelie, catching a news story about a letter recovered from a crash site and delivered to its addressee decades later, plays to Madeleine’s self-delusion by concocting a fake letter. Again, it’s a scene so blithe in its execution that you don’t immediately stop to worry about how justified or otherwise Amelie is in her actions.

There are other dark and sometimes unexpected touches: Nino’s part-time job at a porn shop; Amelie imagining a news report of her own funeral; Amelie and Nino’s first actual meeting on a ghost train, Nino dressed as a skeleton; Amelie’s match-making backfiring as the couple’s relationship fragments under a mélange of neuroses, jealousy and hypochondria. It’s probably the savory tang of these moments that makes ‘Amelie’ work; saves it from becoming too cutesy and sentimental.

I’ve broken the 1,000 word mark on this article and could double or triple that with ease. But time is marching on and I’ve got ‘A Very Long Engagement’ to watch. There is plenty more to say about the film – I’ll doubtless revisit it some day on this blog – but the final word goes to the cast. The Jeunet Regulars – Dominique Pinon, Ticky Holgado and Rufus – are present and correct and doing stellar work. Indeed, every role is perfectly essayed. But, oh, the title role. The casting goes beyond perfect. Audrey Tautou defines the title role. Audrey Tautou was born to play Amelie.

And Jeunet to direct it.

Priceless

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: impulse buys / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 41 of 100

Why buy?

Audrey Tautou’s in it.

And?

Dude, I didn’t need any reason beyond that.

The expectation

A sparkling if lightweight romantic comedy.

The actuality

‘Priceless’ occupies the middle ground between ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and ‘Pretty Woman’. For all that it made Audrey Hepburn an icon, ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is a vapid film about shallow people. For all that it made Julia Roberts a star, the same goes for ‘Pretty Woman’.

Audrey Tautou came to ‘Priceless’ already an icon thanks to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s ‘Amelie’. That film was a delight: warm, funny, entertaining, imaginative and utterly life-affirming. ‘Priceless’ is about attractive people with a taste for the high life who shack up with rich older people and basically leech off them. I was tempted to phrase that last sentence in shorter, punchier fashion as “people who fuck other people for money”. But for all that la belle Audrey floats through the proceedings modelling a series of clinging, diaphanous and generally revealing outfits, Pierre Salvadori’s film never truly gets down and dirty with the more salacious aspects of its narrative.

The plot: Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a bartender at a posh Riviera hotel, is mistaken by gold digger Irene (Tautou) for a high roller. By the time she realises her error, Irene’s indiscretion with Jean has cost her the companionship of her latest sugar daddy. Alone and having to make do without her customary access to unlimited credit, Irene desperately tries to find another filthy rich consort. Meanwhile, having figured out that materialism is the way to Irene’s heart, Jean reinvents himself as a gigolo.

Now, this kind of scenario could work as a metaphor for the moral bankruptcy of both the moneyed classes and those who aspire to be part of same. Some razor-sharp satirical comedy could have been created, but only if the filmmakers were critical of the characters and their actions. As it is, Salvadori seems to be winkingly encouraging of their vacuity.

At best, it’s a pacy enough timewaster graced by better performances than its script and direction had any right to achieve. Elmaleh plays Jean with enough rumpled hangdog charm to merit a soupcon of empathy, while Tautou – svelte, elegant and so meltingly lovely that she could play Lucrezia Borgia or Elizabeth Bathory and you’d still spend the movie dreamily falling for her – is the ideal romantic heroine never mind that Irene is a money-grubbing little slapper about as far removed from Amelie as you can get.

At worst, it’s a depressingly empty piece of work. If it had come out of Hollywood riding the coat-tails of one of the ‘Sex in the City’ movies, you could shake your head, shrug your shoulders and grumble that it was only to be expected. But it came out of France, a country – nay, a culture – that has always (and with plentiful justification) prided itself on its ongoing contribution to world cinema. Not this time, mes amis.

Good buy/bad buy?

Bad buy. We’re talking a once-only viewing experience here.