A very long endurance test

Noel Vera

I was never a fan of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amelie."

I was, however, a fan of Jeunet's early features, back when he was
co-directing with Marc Caro. "Delicatessen" (1991), and "La cite des
enfants perdus" (City of Lost Children, 1995) were brilliant,
toylike contrivances, chock full of CGI effects, strange angled
shots, and grotesque characters. There was something childlike in
their films even then, but behind that childishness was an
amorality, a lust for comically macabre images that made you think
of Tim Burton (only maybe five years older, and with a French
accent). That taste for the grotesque, the bracingly chill tone (non-
fans like to call it their "lack of heart") helped offset the whimsy
and pathos that ran like an undercurrent in their films--made the
pathos all the more poignant, in fact, by keeping it (at least in my
opinion) so subdued.

Then Jeunet and Caro parted ways, to allow Jeunet to make the
fourth "Alien" movie, "Alien Resurrection" (1997) and reactions from
most critics, to put it kindly, were mixed. But Jeunet was working
on a popular horror franchise, and it was as if the shadow of Caro
(or a coarser version, anyway), hovered over his shoulder, keeping
him (fairly) true to course; he also had Darius Khondji, the
cinematographer who gave him all the fabulous shadows and vivid
colors in "Delicatessen" and " La cite des enfants perdus," and Joss
Whedon, who would inject a refreshing dose of black comedy into the
horror cliché of alien monsters stalking the crew of a ship in deep
space. The result was strange and poetic and funny at the same time,
easily my favorite of the "Alien" movies.

Then came "Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain" ('The fabulous
destiny of Amelie Poulain,' better known as 'Amelie,' 2001). Whedon
was not on board (he would go on and create the cult TV
series, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," bringing his unique brand of
comic horror to full bloom there), nor was Khondji, and Caro had
long since gone. Jeunet chose for his lead actress a gaminelike
woman by the name of Audrey Tautou, and decided to tell the story
his way--that is, full of whimsy, pathos, and brightly-lit digital
special effects.

"Amelie" was a hit, of course; stuff any confection with enough
cream and sugar and people will buy it, and "Amelie" was full of
sugary eye candy; throw in the charms of Tautou (touted as the new
Audrey Hepburn), and the picture is practically irresistible, one of
the biggest-earning foreign-language films ever made.

Tautou somehow never did quite appeal to me (Audrey Hepburn?
Really?), and the movie itself I never found never all that
appetizing. I like my sweets cut with a dose of something more
astringent--skepticism, distance, irony, whatever; Jeunet without
Caro was like a bottle of Karo syrup squirted straight into the
mouth without the benefit of pancakes. The undercurrent has become a
deluge, and only the occasional cruel prank played by Amelie, plus
the hope that even a smidgen of Caro's sensibility might have rubbed
off on Jeunet kept me from walking out (Alas, not even a hint).

Jeunet's latest, "Un long dimanche de fiancailles" (A very long
engagement, 2004), adapted from the novel by Jean-Baptiste Rossi
(a.k.a. Sebastien Japrisot), is a darker, altogether more serious-
seeming effort, set in the trenches of World War 1. Five French
soldiers who have attempted to exempt themselves from combat by
mutilating their hands are court-martialed, and condemned to walk
out into the no man's land between French and German lines, to die
there; some years later, polio-stricken Mathilde (Audrey Tautou),
one of the soldiers' girlfriend, suspects that her man Manech
(Gaspard Ulliel) is still alive, and limps out into the world to
search for him. The movie moves back and forth in time to show us
both Manech's ordeal and Mathilde's search.

It's a complicated story with a large cast of characters and a
mystery at its very heart, but when you think about it, it's
basically Vittorio de Sica's "I Girasoli" (Sunflower, 1970), only
with more elaborate trimmings (Tautou as Sophia Loren? Really?). In
the hands of a storyteller like Stanley Kubrick (I'm thinking of how
he handled the many characters and parallel intersecting lines of
action in "The Killing") the mystery and its solution should be
clear as day; in Jeunet's hands it's trench sludge. Jeunet trowels
on an inordinate amount of voiceover narration to try make matters
more coherent; I'm not a fan of voiceovers but if used well, like
(again) in "The Killing," it does help clarify--unfortunately Jeunet
also tries for a poetic effect, the end result of which is more
risible and pretentious than poetic, at least in the translated
subtitles I saw. Show, don't tell, and if you have to tell, keep it
simple and to the point--a good rule to make films by.

To confuse things further Jeunet adds his typical digressions: a
prostitute named Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard) uses bizarre
weaponry and methods to assassinate men; a sequence where Mathilde,
who turns out not to be so crippled, indulges in a bit of wheelchair
slapstick to steal a document; a spectacular blimp sequence that
otherwise has no relation to the story; a subplot involving a
sterile farmer, his wife, and his best friend, which DOES figure,
only Jeunet indulged in a bit of stunt casting and put Jodie Foster
in the role of housewife, blooming (or at least trying her level
best to) under the sexual attentions of another man…the equivalent
of asking perky androgyne Julie Andrews to play the eponymous role
in "The Story of O," and about as successful, sensually speaking.

There are strong scenes: Lombardi's story ends on an ironic note,
literally; Foster has a nicely awkward moment when she confronts her
lover-to-be for the first time (it's when they take their clothes
off that she stops being convincing); the trench sequences are
consistently strong, when Jeunet doesn't resort to the use of
digital tweaking to try make the horror more horrifying--the
overhead shot of a man flung towards the camera lens by a shell
explosion, for example, recalls more the shenanigans found in
the "Matrix" movies rather than the kind of unblinking imagery you
see in such World War 1 classics as Kubrick's "Paths of Glory" or
Lewis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front."

What seriousness there is seems borrowed from Rossi's book, with
much pasteurizing to kill the more disturbing implications; what war
images and violence there are seemed either jazzed up from old war
pictures, or collected (the weirder ones, anyway) from quick phone
consultations with Marc Caro. It's a more ambitious movie, sure, and
surely Jeunet did his best with it, but it's like a child who puts
on adult clothes, quotes adult words and mimics adult gestures--
cute, but hardly convincing. If "Amelie" was a sunny French film
that helped distract audiences from 9/11(it opened in the U.S.A. not
long after, which may help explain some of its popularity), this
film seems designed to give us a more comforting view of war apropos
of recent developments in Iraq.

Castwise--well, Jeunet is not exactly known for his quietly intense,
Bergmanlike explorations of character, not when the odd exploding
gasbag will serve as well, and probably sell more tickets. Tautou
does well enough, but is denied her character's more unsettling
undertones (her Mathilde has been retooled from Rossi's original to
be more sunny and less angry); Ulliel as her fiancé is basically a
dumbkopf in distress; Foster as mentioned is better at being
embarrassed than erotic; and Cotillard as the Jane Bond prostitute
walks away with the movie on a pair of high heels.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/4/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)