A Very Long Engagement
| A Very Long Engagement | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Jean-Pierre Jeunet |
| Produced by | Francis Boespflug Bill Gerber Jean-Louis Monthieux Fabienne Tsaï |
| Screenplay by | Jean-Pierre Jeunet Guillaume Laurant |
| Based on |
Un long dimanche de fiançailles by Sébastien Japrisot |
| Starring |
Audrey Tautou Gaspard Ulliel Marion Cotillard Dominique Pinon Chantal Neuwirth André Dussolier Ticky Holgado Jodie Foster |
| Narrated by | Florence Thomassin |
| Music by | Angelo Badalamenti |
| Cinematography | Bruno Delbonnel |
| Edited by | Hervé Schneid |
| Distributed by | Warner Independent Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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133 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Budget | $56.6 million |
| Box office | $70.1 million |
A Very Long Engagement (French: Un long dimanche de fiançailles) is a 2004 French romantic war film, co-written and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou. It is a fictional tale about a young woman's desperate search for her fiancé who might have been killed during World War I. It was based on a novel of the same name, written by Sebastien Japrisot, first published in 1991.
The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction and the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the Oscars. Marion Cotillard won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.
Five French soldiers are convicted of self-mutilation in order to escape military service during World War I. They are condemned to face near certain death in the no man's land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but Mathilde, the fiancée of one of the soldiers, refuses to give up hope and begins to uncover clues as to what actually took place on the battlefield. She is all the while driven by the constant reminder of what her fiancé had carved into one of the bells of the church near their home, MMM for Manech Aime Mathilde (Manech Loves Mathilde; a pun on the French word aime, which is pronounced like the letter "M". In the English-language version, this is changed to "Manech's Marrying Mathilde").
Along the way, she discovers the brutally corrupt system used by the French government to deal with those who tried to escape the front. She also discovers the stories of the other men who were sentenced to the no man's land as a punishment. She, with the help of a private investigator, attempts to find out what happened to her fiancé. The story is told both from the point of view of the fiancée in Paris and the French countryside—mostly Brittany—of the 1920s, and through flashbacks to the battlefield.
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