From the director and star of "Amelie" (Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou) comes a very different love story, "A Very Long Engagement," based on the acclaimed novel by Sebastien Japrisot. The film is set in France near the end of World War I in the deadly trenches of the Somme, in the gilded Parisian halls of power, and in the modest home of an indomitable provincial girl. It tells the story of this young woman's relentless, moving and sometimes comic search for her fiancée, who has disappeared. He is one of five French soldiers believed to have been court-martialed under mysterious circumstances and pushed out of an allied trench into an almost-certain death in no-man's land. What follows is an investigation into the arbitrary nature of secrecy, the absurdity of war, and the enduring passion, intuition and tenacity of the human heart. [TRAILER]

STEVEN SNYDER'S REVIEW

“A Very Long Engagement” is not only about an epic romance, but about a very long war, a drawn-out investigation and a detailed profile of soldiers who spent their final days at the battle of the Somme. The result, unfortunately, is something that feels like a very long movie.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who crafted the uplifting and popular “Amelie,” Jeunet uses much the same techniques here that he used then, taking the story’s small details, such as a red mitten, and then expanding on their elaborate back story and how they fit in to the movie’s larger world. The real question going in to “Engagement” is how well this style adapts from a romance to a war story, from an intimate affair to one of wider scope and import.

At the center of both experiences is Audrey Tautou, who continues to dominate any scene in which she appears. Not only beautiful and mysterious, she is an indescribable mix of strength and vulnerability, the kind of woman who seems to need the men in her life but functions just perfectly without them.

Here, she plays a polio sufferer who finds herself torn between those two roles, engaged to a soldier overseas, trying to be both strong for her family but terrified at the thought of him never coming home. One day she receives a death notice, and her faith is put to the ultimate test. If he was dead, she says, she would know, but without a body to look at, she sets out on a quest to find discover the truth about her lover’s fate.

What will unfold is a mystery of sizeable proportions, involving about a dozen soldiers involved in the war who were the last to see her fiancée, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), alive. Apparently desperate to get out of the war, Manech and four others shot themselves in the hands to get a transfer home, only to be labeled cowards and sentenced to death. But a kind soul in the French army equips them for the cold and releases them into the war zone late one night.

In some ways this film is the more successful and dramatic counterpart to last year’s “Cold Mountain,” fueled by the passion that was missing from that Jude Law/Nicole Kidman affair. Here, Tautou clearly loves her fiancée, is convinced that her heart towers above any sort of logic, and pushes forward despite overwhelming odds that the one she loves is no more.

“A Very Long Engagement” both thrives and suffers from Jeunet’s style, and this is the paradox that continues to perplex me days after the movie. In telling the back stories of all these soldiers, crafting the arc of Manech’s and Tautou’s relationship, and then mapping out this detailed investigation as Tautou questions soldiers, digs through government archives, and travels to the battlefield itself, I cannot imagine this film unfolding any other way than it does.

But while in “Amelie” this style matched the substance, helping us to see the magic in every person, detail and nuance that Amelie herself found fascinating, here in “A Very Long Engagement” it feels overused and overdeveloped, as if it has become the ultimate interruption.

The enormity of this drama is just too big to make constant diversions into this or that back story or history. The film feels schizophrenic and distracted, and while the initial histories of the five condemned men provides a fascinating comparison between backgrounds and hardships, later segments of the film rely more on the narrator and on these asides that on real scenes of people talking.

What’s really missing from this story of war, hope and devotion is empathy. It feels like we’re watching the detailed emotional outline of a story rather than the story of itself, or perhaps the scattered introduction to a fable that we never quite get to hear or care about.

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