A Very Long Engagement

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A Very Long Engagement

"A Very Long Engagement" film poster
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Produced by Francis Boespflug
Bill Gerber
Jean-Louis Monthieux
Fabienne Tsaï
Written by Sébastien Japrisot (novel),
Jean-Pierre Jeunet,
Guillaume Laurant
Starring Audrey Tautou,
Gaspard Ulliel,
Jodie Foster
Marion Cotillard,
Dominique Pinon,
Chantal Neuwirth,
André Dussolier,
Ticky Holgado
Music by Angelo Badalamenti
Cinematography Bruno Delbonnel
Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures
Release date(s) October 27, 2004
Running time 133 min
Language French
Official website
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

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 based on the novel which stars Audrey Tautou.

Contents

[edit] Plot introduction

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.

[edit] Cast

[edit] 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. Marion Cotillard won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

[edit] Critical reception and box office

The film received generally positive reviews from critics. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 77% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 140 reviews.[1] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 76 out of 100, based on 39 reviews.[2] The film had a production budget of $56.6 million USD and earned $70.1 million in theaters worldwide.[3]

[edit] 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 to the letter M. In the English subtitles, the initials were preserved by substituting the wording "Manech's Marrying Mathilde".

[edit] References

  1. ^ A Very Long Engagement - Movie Reviews, Trailers, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved on 2008-02-06.
  2. ^ Very Long Engagement, A (2004): Reviews. Metacritic. Retrieved on 2008-02-06.
  3. ^ A Very Long Engagement (2004). Box Office Mojo. Retrieved on 2008-02-06.

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Feature films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Delicatessen (with Marc Caro 1991) · The City of Lost Children (with Marc Caro, 1995) · Alien Resurrection (1997) · Amélie (2001) · A Very Long Engagement (2004)