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A Very Long Engagement
Plot (Spoiler Alert)Mathilde and Manech have known each other since they were kids and grew up as lovers. They get engaged, but then Manech is called off to war and the engagement is put on hold. During the war he disappears, so she searches for the man she loves by interviewing the returning survivors of World War I who knew Manech. 
Blaine: The tint of the movie is sepia when it shows France and then the scenes that take place during the war, the color palette is muted. The whole movie I would describe as a very visual film. My dad and I love a lot of the cinematography in “A Very Long Engagement”. We love the romance of it, but we also love how visual it is. My dad really likes this shot of Marion Cotillard fading into the shadows after she killed Commandant Lavrouye by shooting at the mirror above him and letting the glass break and fall on his belly causing a slow and painful death. The scene is in a dark tunnel with bright light coming from the outside on both ends. First you see the scene shot from behind the man who is approaching from one direction. After you see the opposite angle from Marion Cotillard’s direction. The other character (from both angles) is in silhouette from the strong backlight. When we see Marion lift the veil off her face, there is very interesting light hitting her sunglasses. It was shot next to Pont Alexandre III (a bridge along the Seine River in Paris). It’s my dad’s favorite bridge in Paris. I also like Marion’s pose in that scene and the way she moves slowly moving the veil away from her face and removing the sunglasses she is wearing. Marion Cotillard’s character in the film is someone who also was engaged until her fiancé went off to war, but he was betrayed and killed. So she goes after the people responsible and murders them. She has no regret for killing and she accepts death after being caught because the man she loved was all she had to live for. To figure out the camera movement at the beginning of the film (in the trench) they started off by making a small model and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet would shoot with a little video camera as an example of how he wanted the camera movement. Towards the beginning of the film it shows similar sounds of the sawing a piece of wood to the sound of a woman getting fucked. And shortly after that there’s a scene that shows a married couple riding on a hay wagon and they are stopped by soldiers. Then wind comes, the hay blows into the air clockwise like a twister. Jean-Pierre said it required a huge amount of work. They had to grow a field of flax just for that shot and to move the grass they used a helicopter. While Mathilde is being driven to Rennes Hospital it shows a aerial view tracking a vintage car driving down a dirt road. Les Halles was a Paris market back in 1863. It was demolished in 1971 and became a shopping mall. They open the scene of the market with the camera high overhead on a crane and they seamlessly lower the crane to the ground and the cameraman steps off holding a steady cam and proceeds to walk through the crates of food toward the market. I was surprised that Jodie Foster was in the film, but at the same time I wasn’t because I know for fact she speaks French. I found out she spoke French a year before I saw “A Very Long Engagement” and I watched this video of her when she was a teenager singing this French song in a music video. Jodie was in Paris while filming “Panic Room” and she had called Jean-Pierre Jeunet and told him she would love to play a French woman and he gave her the opportunity to appear in “A Very Long Engagement” because it was too late to give her an important role. Jodie chose the secondary role and it was a treat for Jean-Pierre to have an actress like Jodie Foster apart of the project. In the movie Mathilde plays the tuba and actress Audrey Tautou had to take tuba lesson because she is actually playing the tuba in the film. They shot Place de l’Opera and then digitally added the buildings to a test-drive area where the result is to look like the 1920s with old fashioned cars and buses driving around and extras walking. There’s a scene where Mathilde and Manech are in a cave and Manech tries to light up a candle, but she keeps blowing the match out. Every time he lights up a match, a piece of her clothing has already been removed. I like how the match lights up the place. Mathilde is pretending she is in a wheelchair during this one scene and after she gets off the elevator and stands up in front of two people she says “It doesn’t happen only in Lourdes” and my dad said that Lourdes is a place where people go who are crippled, hoping for a miracle. In the end Mathilde is reunited with Manech, but the problem is he has lost his memory because of the war and he doesn’t recognize Mathilde. But the main thing is he is alive and that’s good enough and it’s possible his memory could return sometime after that. They were lucky when they shot that last scene that day because the weather was very nice. My rating on “A Very Long Engagement” is five out of five stars. Cinematography Shots on Page 2 |