A Terrible Beauty
by
Howard Schumann

In Miracle on 34th Street as Natalie Wood is trying to decide about Santa Claus, her mother tells her that "faith is believing in something when common sense tells you not to." In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's brilliant new film, A Very Long Engagement, Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) is a case in point. A polio victim since childhood, she maintains faith that she will one day be reunited with her fiancé Manech, a conscript in World War I, who is reported to be dead. Based on the 1991 novel by Sébastien Japrisot , the film is a dreamlike exploration of two sides of human nature: the darkness that leads to the horror of war, and the lightness that embodies the power of love. There are multiple subplots and a plethora of characters that make the film difficult to keep up with, but Mathilde's unrelenting mission to discover the truth keeps us focused.

The film opens in the style of Jeunet's Amelie as a soft-voiced narrator (Florence Thomassin) introduces the main characters. Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), a baby-faced nineteen year old, is one of five soldiers court-martialed for wounding themselves to escape the front lines. Along with Manech, who is in a state of shock, are Bastoche (Jérôme Kircher), Six-Sous (Denis Lavant), Ange Bassignano (Dominique Bettenfeld) and Benoît Notre-Dame (Clovis Cornillac). The sadistic punishment for the five men is not execution but being dropped off in a no-man's land without weapons or protection, where their chances of survival are very slim.

Four years after the war, Mathilde refuses to believe that Manech is dead in spite of various eyewitness accounts of his being hit by machine gun fire. Her search for her childhood sweetheart forms the main storyline and the mystery unfolds slowly like pieces of a puzzle being fit together. With the support of her Aunt Bénédicte (Chantal Neuwith) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon) who raised her after her parents were killed in a bus accident at age three, Mathilde hires a private detective Germain Pire (Ticky Holgado) to investigate. She undertakes her own search as well, compiling photographs, news stories, interviews with survivors who may be possible leads, and visits to Paris and Bingo Crépuscule, the trench where the soldiers were sentenced to death. Audrey Tautou is convincing in her role and we root for her to find her man, though we know the odds are stacked against it.

Her search leads her to discover for herself the barbarity of war and the courage of the individual soldier, fighting tenaciously for survival in the trenches. The film does not spare our sensibilities in graphically showing war scenes as unsettling as the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Jeunet is a master of cinematic tricks, and there is plenty here to keep us dazzled: flashbacks, fast edits, colorful imagery, and tones that alternate between sepia, salmon, and blue, but the film is not about cinematic showmanship. It is about a relationship that is deeper than physical and one person's fierce determination to go beyond reasonableness and alter what is accepted as reality. A Very Long Engagement will not be eligible for nomination as the year's best foreign-language film because one third of it is American produced. I would suggest instead a nomination for best picture. It is that good.

In Undertow , the third film by David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls), two young brothers, Tim (Devon Allen) and Chris (Jamie Bell), flee the violence of their rural home in Georgia. Co-produced by Terrence Malick, Undertow has aspects of a conventional thriller but it bears Green's unmistakable languid, dreamy style, though many are comparing it to Terrence Malick's Badlands and Charles Laughton's classic Night of the Hunter. Using an abundance of yellow, brown, and red tones, cinematographer Tim Orr effectively captures the atmosphere of the poor South with its abandoned spaces, junkyards, urban rot, and backwoods pig farms. Green has a feel for the way people talk and the dialogue achieves a rare naturalism, but this is not a film in the neo-realist tradition. It's lyrical tone puts it in more in the land of Huck Finn and Robinson Crusoe, territory reserved for myth and poetry.

Using freeze frames, slow motion, color manipulation, and transitional fades, the opening sequence captures Chris's escape from his girl friend's menacing father after he accidentally breaks a window trying to alert her of his presence. Impaling his foot on a board and nail, he stumbles home with his foot bleeding severely and later uses the board to make an airplane to give to his 10-year old brother, Tim. In a subplot that makes us aware of the eccentricity of the characters, Tim has some strange stomach problems, and eats paint and dirt to induce vomiting, a condition, according to the director who suffered the same malady, called pica brought on by malnourishment. The early pace is leisurely but things heat up when Uncle Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up. Recently out of prison, he harbors resentments against his brother (Dermot Mulroney) for marrying his sweetheart and taking part of his inheritance of Mexican gold coins. Oddly, his brother invites him to stay at the farm, but we can tell that he's there for more than hominy grits and southern fried chicken.

Resentment soon turns to violence, and the boys, threatened by the wounded uncle, escape on foot seeking out food and shelter wherever it is available. On the run, they undertake a nightmarish journey through forests and swamps, on freight cars and foot, spending time with people living on the margins: a friendly black couple and some runaway girls who Chris is drawn to out of loneliness and fear. As Uncle Deel closes in, the film becomes less about the chase and more about the characters and the relationship between the brothers. Jamie Bell, the English actor who played Billy Eliot, turns in a magnificent performance as Chris, and Josh Lucas is convincing as the deranged uncle. Utilizing a haunting score by Philip Glass, Undertow gradually builds its low-key tension to a power that becomes riveting. In spite of some repetitive chase scenes and a few superfluous camera tricks, it is Green's best film and deserves more than a limited release.

.©2005 Howard Schumann
CineScene