Jayplay movie reviewers Bob Ward and Stephen Shupe go head to head and star to star over "A Very Long Engagement."

Bob Ward: Langorous and sweeping, A Very Long Engagement cuts through the ponderous self-importance that can plague war movies and just tells its story. Although he doesn’t flinch from showing limbs shot off, friends blown up and countless other sorts of carnage from the first world war, the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet uses too light of a touch to let the violence overpower the audience’s sympathy.

The movie follows the search of a widow named Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) for her fiancé Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), who was killed under mysterious circumstances on the western front. A dying officer tells her that her husband and four others were executed for self-mutilation by being thrown from a trench into no man’s land.

Jeunet shows the mystery unfolding and re-folding by cutting to flashbacks and expositions at the slightest mention of past events. There are no summations or reviews to help catalogue this mountain of information. It’s refreshing that the director and the screenwriter, Guillaume Laurant, think highly enough of the audience not to muddle their intricate story by baldly explaning it or dumbing it down.

Besides Jeunet’s trademark loopiness (“She played tuba because it was the only instrument capable of distress calls.” Engagement draws much of its strength from Mathilde’s resolve. Her search is not popular, and Tautou deftly shows a woman using pity, luck and tenacity, sometimes at the expense of those who love her, to find the only thing she wants.

Three and a half stars

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Stephen Shupe: The first 10 minutes of A Very Long Engagement, the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s big-budget follow-up to Amélie, capture the horrors of trench warfare better than any World War I movie since 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Jeunet, a movie magician who blends computer graphics and live action into a heightened cinematic reality, creates a vivid opening sequence reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan.

Then, without warning, the director pulls us into Amélie country to introduce an eccentric cast of characters. It’s a jarring transition from which the movie never fully recovers.

Amélie’s Audrey Tautou plays Mathilde, the film’s plucky, faithful heroine. Stricken with polio as a child, Mathilde befriends and falls in love with Manech (Strayed’s Gaspard Ulliel), the son of the town’s lighthouse keeper.

In the war, Manech is rounded up with four other soldiers and charged with self-mutilation – an offense punishable by death. Mathilde refuses to believe Manech has been killed, so she embarks on a years-long search for her intended with the help of a private detective.

Fans of Amélie will recognize Jeunet’s bizarre character touches, such as the shopkeeper with the perfectly articulate wooden hand. But they should be forewarned that Engagement is a graphically violent film with a subplot about a diabolically clever, homicidal war bride.

Tautou and Ulliel are sweet, doe-eyed young actors rippling with oceans of dramatic feeling. But the film, which features a sexy cameo appearance by Jodie Foster, unsuccessfully melds battlefield realism with romantic whimsy. The director’s narrative choices – such as placing a key flashback about Mathilde and Maneche’s romance halfway through the movie – often blunt the story’s emotional impact.

I’m in the minority on this one, but I think Jeunet has betrayed his artistic impulse to make a darker, more harrowing antiwar film. He just can’t seem to break away from the Amélie magic.

Two stars