MOVIE REVIEW

This fairy tale serves up a twisting story with imagery strange and beautiful amid the horror of WWI.

By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer

"A Very Long Engagement," which stars Audrey Tautou as a solemn gamine in love, has the kind of slyly clever title that suggests the wedding was called off because of a misunderstanding between the servants, or a freak-out on the part of the fiancé. And, certainly, the presence of Tautou, whose uncanny magnetism can repel or attract with the slightest shift in gesture, would seem to support this notion.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed Tautou in the blockbuster "Amélie" and created, with Marc Caro, the windup jewel boxes of "Delicatessen" and "City of Lost Children," adapts Sébastien Japrisot's novel into a fairy tale about a storybook heroine and her amazing adventures, albeit one that's peppered with scenes of soldiers exploding into bits in the trenches of the Somme. "A Very Long Engagement" is a resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair — if you like that sort of thing.

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The movie begins in 1919, two years after Manech's (Gaspard Ulliel) court-martial and death sentence for intentionally wounding himself on the front, and his disappearance. The official word on Manech is that he's dead. But the smart and superstitious Mathilde (Tautou), who lives with her doting aunt and uncle on a farm in Brittany, believes that if this were the case, she'd know it somehow. As it stands, she's not convinced.

Mathilde's search for Manech begins one day when she gets a letter from a dying soldier in a hospital. Lt. Esperanza (Jean-Pierre Becker) transported Manech and five other prisoners to a trench in the Somme called Bingo Crépuscule, where the officers had orders to ditch the prisoners in a no-man's land bordering the German front. The lieutenant knows that Manech survived the first night, but that's as much as he knows.

It's enough for Mathilde to engage the help of a private detective, the exuberant Monsieur Germain Pire (Ticky Holgado), and begin inching toward the truth.

Together, at an excruciating pace, Mathilde and Pire piece together the lives of the other prisoners — a welder, two carpenters, a farmer and a Corsican pimp — by writing and talking to their wives and girlfriends (including a distracting Jodie Foster in a French-speaking role), and following the thrilling exploits of the pimp's revenge-bent girlfriend in the press.

Jeunet's stylistic extremes never quite cohere into an overall tone — at times, "A Very Long Engagement" looks like the unholy hybrid between "Saving Private Ryan" and "Cold Comfort Farm." Scenes of brutal trench fighting come across as all the more compassionate for the steady, clinical distance Jeunet keeps. It's in these scenes that the film's pervading sense of irreality is at its most subdued.

At home, Mathilde sleeps on embroidered sheets, eats galettes straight from the stove and plays the tuba, "the only instrument capable of emitting a cry of distress." (The scenes can also feel surrealistically cruel, as when one of the sentencing officers complains: "It was bad here too, you know. In Paris, you couldn't get a taxi after the opera.") Still, the juxtapositions are somehow oddly satisfying, and the imagery is strange and beautiful. In one scene, soldiers approach a farmer to recruit him, and the sea of grain between them parts as though bisected by a gust of wind or a blast of fate by a cruel world.

"A Very Long Engagement" indulges our stylistic Francophilia, but it refuses to pander to the rules of romance. The outcome of the story is happily mixed. If Tautou's moist-eyed steely-chinned performance feels slightly familiar at first, the sense is somewhat deceptive. The old Amélie puckishness is there, in the lighter moments, but roiling underneath it there's a barely contained despair.

Mathilde walks with a limp since contracting polio two years after her parents died in an accident when she was 3. The experiences have clearly put the fear of luck into her, and she's forever bargaining with some cosmic force to let Manech be alive if the dog comes into the room before dinner is called, or if she makes it around a bend before a car does. Mostly, Tautou plays these little games for the girlish superstitions they are. But there are moments when it seems as if she is really trying to make some kind of deal with whoever's in charge — God having died by World War I already, at least according to the French.

All in all, Jeunet makes a pretty case for the idea that life is ruled by chaos and chance, but made meaningful and worthwhile by love.

'A Very Long Engagement'

MPAA rating: R for violence and sexuality

Times guidelines: Extremely graphic violence, some nudity

Audrey Tautou...Mathilde

Gaspard Ulliel...Manech

Chantal Neuwirth...Bénédicte

Dominique Pinon...Sylvain

Jodie Foster...Élodie Gordes

Marion Cotillard...Tina Lombardi

Jean-Claude Dreyfus...Commandant Lavrouye

André Dussollier...Rouvières

Ticky Holgado...Germain Pire

Tcheky Karyo...Capt. Favourier

2003 Productions and Warner Bros. Pictures present a Warner Bros. France-Tapioca Films-TF1 Films Production co-production, released by Warner Independent Pictures. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Production director Jean-Marc Deschamps. Line producer Jean-Lou Monthieux. Executive producer Bill Gruber. Story and adaptation by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant. Dialogue Guillaume Laurant. Based on the novel by Sébastien Japrisot. Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. Editor Herve Schneid. Costume designer Madeline Fontaine. Music Angelo Badalementi. Set designer Aline Bonetto. Running time: 2 hours, 13 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle's Royal and the Regent Showcase. In French with English subtitles.