A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) is a 2004 film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and distributed by Warner Bros. 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). The film was nominated for two Oscars, but did not win any. It was not eligible for the Best Foreign-Language Film award.

The film's tagline is "Never let go."

Controversy

The "nationality" of the film has been of some controversy. French films are subsidized by the government through the Centre National de la Cinematographie , and the makers have applied for a US$4.3 million grant. However, rival filmmakers don't believe the film should receive the subsidy because it is not really a French film, because most of the funding for its US$55 million cost came from Warner Bros.

Selected cast

• Audrey Tautou
• Gaspard Ulliel
• Jean-Pierre Becker
• Dominique Bettenfeld
• Clovis Cornillac
• Marion Cotillard
• Jean-Pierre Darroussin
• Julie Depardieu
• Jean-Claude Dreyfus
• André Dussollier
• Jodie Foster
• Ticky Holgado
• Tchéky Karyo
• Jérôme Kircher
• Denis Lavant
• Chantal Neuwirth

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 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 of the 1920's, and in flashback to the battlefield.

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 the same as the letter M. In the English subtitles, the initials were preserved by substituting the wording "Manech's Marrying Mathilde".

• The Albatross aircraft featured was made by the German company Albatros Flugzeugwerke.

External link