And despite my fairly quick edit to the last post, thank you dolcevita for immortalizing it.

Your take on the film is fascinating, dolce, much more so than my own thoughts on the film, which was that it simply didn't register.

The film, to me, seemed as empty as the surroundings and style he was criticising. That's a rather kind C+ you've awarded it up there.

I couldn't finish my attempted re-watching; I pretty much despised the film.

I've rented some Bunuel and Truffaut I haven't seen from the library to wash the taste away.

A Very Long Engagement

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou team up once anew, and with their coupling comes many of the stylistic quirks and atmosphere of their earlier film “The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain”. Only this time around director Jeunet’s telling of A Very Long Engagement is in itself a significantly more invested tale that allows for Jeunet’s tangent narrative spins to move the film along rather than just deter from it. Engagement weaves between not the past and present, but the present and visions of a rethought past. Tautou plays Mathilde, a young women searching for the love of her life, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) after World War I. As she uncovers more and more about the night of his death she continuously remodels the events in order to accommodate the new information. The story itself is a quite a straightforward tale of hopeful love, life, and youthful determination, but it is necessarily simple since the main attraction of the movie focuses on its manipulation of time.

Manech is so desperate to return home early that he purposefully mutilates his own hand in an attempt to be granted a permissive ride home. Except that he and four other men accused of similar actions are instead punished by the French army, and are left to die in the no man’s land region between the French and German barracks one night. The series of events that unfolds in the dark of that night and the few hours of morning light are all the information that remains of the presumably dead five men. Mathilde is not convinced of the finality of their situation.

Crippled since youth she sets off to Paris determined to learn the fate of Manech. She’s intelligent and pertinent for a young woman, and manages to recruit many sympathizers along her journey including the prostitute lover of one of the other penalized men. Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard) is the strongest compliment to Mathilde in her simultaneous quest to discover and wreak havoc upon anyone and everyone that assisted in the abandonment and death of her lover in the trenches. Because both Mathilde and Tina are women deeply in love with lost men, the contrasts and similarities in their resulting quests both emphasize the time in which both women operate and the profundity in the nuances of their personalities. Tina actually comes across as far more engaging and intriguing a figure despite her dramatically limited screen time, or perhaps because of it.

Audrey Tautou is perfect in the role of Mathilde, and anyone who already developed an affinity for her look and characterization will find her casting exceptionally successful. Jeunet’s Amelie and Mathilde are remarkably similar, but Mathilde’s story is far more flattering and less ingratiating than Tautou’s now famous former title role. Her innocent eyes and determined mouth work better in this story that demands an impertinent youth on the verge of womanhood. Jeunet’s typical visual tangents are incorporated in much more adept fashions for Engagement. The snips of narrative serve as the revisited visions Mathilde creates of the past, and they work to break the film’s sense of time. They same night’s events change but unfold in present time while as well being woven into Mathilde’s search for answers, past flashbacks to her meetings with Manech before the war, and Tina’s thirst for revenge. Had the film stopped here it would have been excellent. Jeunet, unfortunately, never realizes that Mathilde has enough personality without needing frivolous extra quirks. These quirks come in the form of her annoying habits of testing her hope with random events such as when a conductor will ask for her ticket, or her dog will enter the room. She also plays tuba, but several times too often to watch. Her habits do not ruin the sense of her personality but nor do they add to it.

Ultimately, A Very Long Engagement is a quality film but lacks the suspense to be truly riveting. Mathilde’s quest still remains a goal oriented quest rather than a process oriented journey, and so the focus of an end point still plays too heavy a hand in what could have otherwise been a film truly about time and maturity. One cannot help but notice that the end is too important for the complexities of a film that is not supposed to be exactly linear. Less expository and more creative than most dramas of such a nature, but still crisp and palatable, A Very Long Engagement is a strong movie if not an exceptional one.


Grade: B

Cache

There’s a certain relevancy to Cache that denies frustrated filmgoers that ability to walk away from Michael Haneke’s latest drama without giving it a second thought. The plot, about a family plagued by daily videotapes of themselves, is a red herring of sorts, as Haneke and his cast explore topics of family distrust and the topical yet timeless observation of bourgeois race-relations. Paris is burning, and Cache’s crew is determined to reflect on why.

Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) has everything he could want in life. He hosts an intellectual roundtable on national television, has a beautiful loving wife Anne (Juliet Binoche) and a teenage son who has typical teenage tendencies but nothing more alarming. The family members sit in their lovely living room lined with expensive books, eat dinner together, and split their merry ways to prepare for the following day’s work and classes. Their lives, not their habits, change when videotapes of their home begin appearing at their doorstep. The surveillance expert unknown, Anne and George try to recreate the motions in the footage and figure out who could possibly be standing two feet from them and video recording them without so much as even being visible. Was someone in a car? How about a room in the building across the way? But who would want to do such a thing?

When the tapes begin appearing with child-like hand-drawn images of beheaded victims, Georges and Anne immediately seek the guidance of the police. In all too convenient fashion, the police refuse to get involved until the transgression on privacy becomes violent, rather than just alluding to violence as it has thus far done. Georges angrily and obsessively sets out to track the perpetrator himself. He begins to have flashbacks to a haunting secret from his youth, and becomes convinced his indiscretions as a six year old boy are coming back to haunt him. His secret is so dark that he’s never even told Anne, and he refuses to do so even in their current situation.

In typical French cinema aesthetic and style, Georges and Anne start to fight. Not melodramatic tears and snarls, just the usual bickering and screaming long since established as a polished form by the French New Wave. Thankfully, Haneke does not tie his family trauma to their own alienation from each other alone, but he also works the story into larger social context. His directorial sense of relating national events through the microcosm of the Laurent family saves Cache from being wasted energy and talent. Cache only grows in intensity from its flimsy foundations, and the finale is both shocking and meaningful without being completely infantilizing.

Had Cache not elicited a twice-over gasp from the audience within its final minutes, one would wonder how engaging the experience of the film within a film was. Haneke does a good enough job of weaving the documentary style footage of the unknowing victim family into their real life through use of their voiceovers while watching the tapes. George and Anne at first question and later freak out over the nightly viewings. Likewise the two wonder how the tapes are consistently placed on their doorstep without the deliverer ever being spotted. The pencil and red marker drawings are truly disturbing, and the introduction of postcards and further dissemination of footage makes for what should have been an increasing stress to the family’s experiences. And yet, Caches’ ability to captivate the viewer amongst the family’s arguments and accusations is weak.

Haneke uses too notoriously aloof a style to truly engage viewers in the visceral experience of his thrice over trauma. He leaves no visual substance under the surface to work through, and depends on mutual interest in catching the perpetrator on both sides of the screen to relay interest until broader discourse supercedes the original viewer’s investment. He vies away from his own equation and introduces the topical and historically tragic social agenda. In fairness to his work, he lays down the framework quietly, and allows Cache to build steam as it unfolds. But the climax is in the tune of too little too late. A film that is more interesting to contemplate than it is to actually view; Cache just doesn’t quite catch on.

Grade: B-