If you didn't read newspapers and magazines or watch television at all this fall, would you be able to tell that it's Oscar season?

It actually wouldn't be that hard to guess, just by looking around. Vin Diesel's been M.I.A. since the summer, and the closely correlated explosion-per-minute ratio has taken an industry-wide dive recently. As the days get shorter, movies seem to have longer running times. Like Santa, Oscar's on his way. And just take a look your vacation days for the next two months -- if a movie comes out on Thanksgiving or Christmas, it has to win an Oscar for something, right?

Here's another way to tell: go see Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement (2003 Productions), this year's annual contribution to the well-worn and well-awarded "epic war movie made for women" genre. It's Cold Mountain in French, except better, and not nearly so depressing.

Audrey Tautou as Mathilde.

Like other movies in this so-called genre, A Very Long Engagement features a scrappy, can-do heroine who tells the story of a war, the frontlines of which she never actually witnesses. Mathilde (Audrey Tautou, of Amelie fame) is an orphan with a polio-induced limp, raised in a house in Brittany, France (a village next to the sea) by her adoring aunt and uncle. Her one true love is Manech (Gaspard Ullieil), a local boy whose father is the lighthouse keeper. The two plan to get married, but soon Manech is shipped away to fight in the first World War.

Manech is sent to the muddy, death-filled trenches of the Somme when he is only eighteen. Miserable, he purposely wounds himself in a desperate attempt to return to his home in Brittany. His plan backfires, and along with five other self-mutilators, Menach is court-martialed and pushed out into no man's land, with the expectation that he will be quickly killed by German fire.

That's only the first ten minutes of the movie. Manech disappears for the rest of the film, as Mathilde spends years trying to reconstruct the events surrounding Manech's supposed death. Even though everyone else around her presumes that Manech was killed in battle and has become eager to leave the war years behind, Mathilde, thinking she knows better, crusades to find out the real story. She practices stubborn, defiant optimism in the face of an onslaught of horrendous stories about the war told by its victims. She remains a hopeful and curious child determined to discover the truth no matter how long it takes. Although most tales feature characters who are unambiguously alive or dead, A Very Long Engagement keeps the viewer alienated from the truth about the fate of a main character. Mathilde spends the film traveling throughout France, trying to piece together what happened after her fiancé disappeared into no man's land and became stranded between the world of the dead and the world of the living. 

	Gaspard Ullieil as Manech

Jeunet's elegant handling of the film's love story is patently European. Its romantic portrayal of youth, sexuality and emotion contrasts sharply with American films of the same genre, which tend to feature either over-sexed characters-- who only want to get laid, or, sexless romantics who are content with one candle-lit French kiss at the end of the movie. In light of the glut of this typical mishandling of teen romance, the portrayal of Mathilde and Manech's child-like excitement and optimism about experiencing love and sex for the first time is especially energizing. Mathilde and Manech fall in love before they hit puberty and are engaged by age eighteen.

Jeunet is the creative and talented director who gave us Amelie (France 3 Cinéma 2001), The City of Lost Children (Le Studio Canal/Lumière Pictures, 1995), Delicatessen (Sofinergie Films, 1991) and (unfortunately) Alien: Resurrection (20th Century Fox, 1997). The cinematography and art direction of this film are similarly beautiful and creative, but their look is not as in-your-face as that of Jeunet's other movies. In Amelie, for instance, it seemed that every interior was painted a screaming shade of red, blue, or green and then shot through a filter to make it even more eye-searing and fantastic. The antique colors of A Very Long Engagement are similarly lush, but have a considerably gentler and subtler visual impact than the hues of Jeunet's earlier films.

Audrey Tautou as Mathilde

In fact, fans of Jeunet's other films may be surprised by how un-Jeunet this movie is. This seems to be the director's mainstream turn, á la Peter Jackson. Like Jackson's success with Lord of the Rings, A Very Long Engagement shows that wonderful things can happen when bizarro directors set out to make "normal" movies.

However, as stylistically beautiful A Very Long Engagement might be, it suffers from the same narrative problem that Cold Mountain did: the very nature of the story means that the hero and heroine are together on screen for a very short time. Although Mathilde has a few vivid and illuminating flashbacks to her halcyon days with Manech, they never end up being compelling enough to make the viewer care whether the two lovers ever see each other again. Jeunet has failed to master the difficult art of directing a movie about a long separation that resonates emotionally.

It is frustrating that a highly creative and technically savvy director such as Jeunet has created a film that misses the bull's eye. But even if it's not one for the ages, A Very Long Engagement is still a beautiful and stylish depiction of the years directly following the First World War, when the survivors of France slowly picked up the pieces and returned to the world of the living.

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