A Very Long Engagement

A Very Long Engage­ment [Un long dimanche de fiançailles] is a very long engage­ment indeed. Way too long. About 45 min­utes too long. Watch­ing the movie is like eat­ing a plain baguette, It is sort of tasty when you start but you get tired of it long before the end.

This movie does­n’t know what kind of movie it wants to be, which is prob­a­bly why it runs so long. Is it a mys­tery film?, a romance?, a war film?, a for­eign film?; is the plot struc­ture a nar­ra­tive?, a mem­oir?, or some­thing along the lines of Rashomon? I don’t think Jeunet could decide, so he tried to do them all. I also think he might have a thing for film­ing his wife in the arms of anoth­er man.

Any­way, a lot of The Hunt could’ve been cut, as well as much of the back­sto­ry for every lit­tle char­ac­ter. There is pret­ty much no sus­pense because every­one’s accounts are so frag­ment­ed that the only thing that dri­ves the movie is Audrey Tatou’s rather rigid per­for­mance. Sure yeah, she is hold­ing all of her emo­tions with a tight rein, what­ev­er. The damn post­man pro­vides a more enter­tain­ing per­for­mance.

Per­haps that is where my bias enters. I expect­ed to be enter­tained [well, it is a movie], but maybe I expect­ed to be enter­tained like Amelie enter­tained me. While there are glim­mers of Jeunet’s won­der­ful direc­tor­ship, on the whole the movie thumps about like a drunk in a field at night who is try­ing to find a tree to lean against that has 3 Ms carved into it so he can take a piss stand­ing up and make sure that Jodie Fos­ter [who is still attrac­tive, but not quite as attrac­tive as she was when we were both younger] does­n’t get knocked up by her hus­band’s friend even though all three par­ties were inter­est­ed in reach­ing that con­clu­sion. Did you lose me? I hope so. That is what it felt like to watch the movie. It was pret­ty, but unfor­tu­nate­ly pret­ty long. I think it would be a good movie if it were 90 min­utes instead of 134.

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