A Very Long Engagement

A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fianailles) is a 2004 film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and distributed by Warner Bros. It is a fictional tale about a woman's search for her fiance who might have been killed on a World War I battlefield (the Somme). The film was nominated for two Oscars, but did not win any. It was not eligible for the Best Foreign-Language Film award. The film's tagline is "Never let go."

Controversy

The "nationality" of the film has been of some controversy. French films are subsidized by the government through the Centre National de la Cinematographie, and the makers have applied for a US$4.3 million grant. However, rival filmmakers don't believe the film should receive the subsidy because it is not really a French film, because most of the funding for its US$55 million cost came from Warner Bros.

Selected cast

Plot introduction

Five 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 lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but the fiance of one of the soldiers refuses to give up hope, and begins to uncover clues as to what actually took place on the battlefield. The story is told both from the point of view of the fiance in Paris and the French countryside of the 1920's, and in flashback to the battlefield.

Notes

  • The initials MMM are carved several times by Manech, the fiancé of the heroine Mathilde. They stand for "Manech aime Mathilde", "Manech loves Mathilde". This is a pun: in French the word "aime" ("loves") is pronounced the same as the letter M. In the English subtitles, the initials were preserved by substituting the wording "Manech's Marrying Mathilde".

External link

Very Long Engagement, A Very Long Engagement, A

 

<< PreviousWord BrowserNext >>
basil weedon
mr tulip
mineral springs
minersville
minetto
tudhoe
toronto, ontario events
arisaema
the timekeeper
frank chapman
miguel ngel blanco
if you want blood
bidford on avon
petrified palmwood
ashridge business school
longyan
student (disambiguation)
vector control
hogwarts headache
fireblade
whitworth, county durham
i, claudia
castaway
hyeongsan river
rush, dublin
burning heart records
marin headlands
brancepeth
ss thistlegorm
james ramsay montagu butler
croxdale
severn hill
jokhang
brian haw
the madcap laughs
sunderland bridge
ministry of agriculture
a song for you
pannalal patel
dimitri amilakhvari
spirit singing
army of the southern cross
goon
boa constructor