Jean-Pierre Jeunet locates whimsy in the damnedest places.
Certainly, the playful sensibilities of this French writer-director seemed right at home in the quirky romantic comedy Amelie. Alien: Resurrection doesn’t count one way or the other — just another example of a highly regarded foreign director trying to crack the Hollywood big time and getting chewed up and spit out instead. But in his three other major features to date, Jeunet turned to topics that, in most hands, would seem grotesque choices around which to spin fanciful tales full of charm, humor and lovable characters. Fortunately, all three work.
Delicatessen, whose stateside release was orchestrated by Terry Gilliam, dealt with cannibalism, while The City of Lost Children, which handed Ron Perlman a heroic leading role long before Hellboy came along, centered around a series of child kidnappings. And now Jeunet beings us A Very Long Engagement, a movie that bills itself as a love story even though it’s as much about the horrors of World War I.
The ad material wants us to believe that Engagement is cut from the same cloth as pictures like The English Patient and Reds, movies that place grand romances against the backdrop of wars and revolutions and social upheaval. But Jeunet’s movie is a different kind of epic, with a light touch and an offbeat attitude that strip the story of much of its gravitas and instead replace it with a freewheeling flippancy. Engagement isn’t as overtly funny as Jeunet’s previous films, but its comic quota is still there, resting behind its players’ character quirks or within the tight choreography of several of the more elaborate set pieces. The result is a real curio: often delightful, often tragic, yet never as penetrating as one might expect. It’s easy to see why some critics would dismiss this as a coldly calculating film, yet it’s difficult to grasp why they don’t give more props to Jeunet’s masterful assemblage of so many disparate elements into a cohesive whole.
Initially recalling Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory both in its indictment of war and its disgust at the officers who view their soldiers as expendable objects, Engagement kicks off by detailing how five French soldiers who purposely wounded themselves in order to avoid further combat duty (actually, one self-inflicted injury was an accident, though no one believes it) have instead been corralled and thrown into the no-man’s-land between the French and German trenches. It’s a sadistic form of execution; as one witness puts it, the cold and the hunger will kill the quintet if the Germans don’t.
But despite overwhelming evidence that all five men perished on that battlefield, young Mathilde (Amelie‘s Audrey Tautou), a 20-year-old girl whose body has been crippled by polio but whose mind is always racing ahead (as she puts it, “I’m lame, not dim”), is convinced that at least one prisoner survived the ordeal: her boyish lover Manech (Gaspard Ulliel). Insisting that she would have “felt” Manech’s death, she figures that he must still be alive. So she sets off across the post-war terrain in an effort to track him down, displaying sleuthing skills that would gain the approval of Hercule Poirot or Ellery Queen.
What follows isn’t necessarily complicated, but it is dense in terms of the amount of material being presented: This film seems to boast as many characters in its 133-minutes as TV’s Dallas did during its entire 13-season stretch. And woe to the viewer who loses track of any of them. Yet even if the resolution proves to be underwhelming, the pleasures along the way — most in the form of surprising plot twists, familiar faces popping up in unexpected places (including one American Oscar winner who’s fluent in French), and Jeunet’s gorgeous compositions — should leave most filmgoers satisfied. A Very Long Engagement shows that while war may be hell, war movies can be swell.
Decency is an increasingly rare commodity in American cinema. I’m not
referring to the larger-than-life strain of honor and uprightness: The multiplexes
are full of movies featuring superheroes and gladiators and kick-ass cops. Nor
am I talking about the bogus morality found in such pieces of hypocrisy as Christmas
With the Kranks and Little Black Book, films in which characters
are allowed to behave outrageously until the final five minutes, at which point
they suddenly realize the error of their ways and absorb phony life lessons
in the blink of an eye. No, this morality is the type we can all aspire to,
the everyday brand that affects ordinary people trying to make the right choices
when it comes to their families, their business associates and their own inner
moral compasses.
In Good Company, the new film written and directed by Paul Weitz (About
a Boy), works as well as it does because its central character, Dan Foreman,
is a paragon of uncompromised ideals, and because Dennis Quaid plays him so
perfectly that we can’t help but line up behind this guy and cheer him on. Dan,
the savvy ad manager for a sports magazine, enjoys a camaraderie with his customers
that smacks more of friendship than a business arrangement. He deeply loves
his wife Ann (Marg Helgenberger) and his teenage daughters Alex (Scarlett Johansson)
and Jana (Zena Grey), and he’s excited when he learns that Ann is again pregnant.
He’s popular with his coworkers, especially the ones who flourished under his
mentorship. Like all of us, Dan worries about financial matters (small wonder,
with Alex headed to college and a baby about to be born), but overall, life
is good.
That situation changes once the magazine gets absorbed by a major conglomerate and layoffs start occurring at an alarming rate. Dan’s relieved to learn that he’s not losing his job, but he’s upset that he’s being demoted and will have to answer to corporate golden boy Carter Duryea (Topher Grace), a kid who’s roughly half his age (26 to Dan’s 51).
Sharp writing keeps the relationship between Dan and Carter hopping all the way through the film. Carter isn’t some brass, insensitive upstart but rather a decent guy who’s trying to balance his own code of ethics with life in the fast lane — he’s confused rather than corrupt, and even when he makes the ill-advised decision to start dating Dan’s daughter Alex, we know it’s because of genuine fondness for the girl and not as part of some sick power play (despite the title, this shouldn’t be confused with In the Company of Men, which was about immorality in the work place). Similarly, Alex isn’t a combative daughter who assumes she’s supposed to rebel against her parents because she’s at that age; instead, she’s a smart, agreeable girl who loves her folks but also wants to begin making her own way in the world. Johansson’s role is the most sketchy of the three, but I nevertheless liked her scenes opposite Quaid’s Dan, as the characters attempt to locate that tricky zone between acting like a father and his little girl and carrying on a conversation like two mature adults.
Narratively, In Good Company rarely strays far from convention; for instance, when an opening scene establishes Dan’s chummy relationship with one of his longtime clients (Philip Baker Hall), we can bet that said customer will reappear in the final chunk of the film to help save the day. But ultimately, it’s hard to dislike a picture that goes out of its way to champion integrity in America. Good guy, good values, good movie.
Director Zhang Yimou stated in a recent interview that it’s always
been his dream to make martial arts films. Having now helmed Hero and
House of Flying Daggers, let’s hope he’s gotten it out of his system.House
of Flying Daggers has already earned Best Foreign Film honors from the Los
Angeles Film Critics Association, has appeared on numerous “10 Best” lists,
and is considered one of the frontrunners (along with The Sea Inside)
for the Academy’s foreign flick prize. The only honor I could muster for the
film was to designate it as one of 2004’s most overrated features in my year-end
round-up two issues ago.
If nothing else, Daggers is gorgeous to behold, and that alone almost carries the picture over the hump. Nobody can mix and match reds and greens and blues on screen as effectively as Yimou, and his rainbow visions are probably vibrant enough to even register with the color-blind. Yet the action set pieces within this widescreen palate exude a been-there-done-that vibe for anybody who’s already marveled at the graceful fight ballets in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Yimou’s own Hero. There’s also little evidence of the intricate plot mechanics that drove Tiger and Hero — to say nothing of Takeshi Kitano’s martial arts extravaganza Zatoichi, which for my money should be earning accolades as the best foreign import of last year. The story employed here is so wispy, it barely registers, detailing the efforts of a blind female warrior (the always enchanting Ziyi Zhang) to help a secret society combat empirical corruption in 859AD China. This political intrigue, scarcely developed from the start, vanishes completely once the attention turns to a lackluster love triangle between the blind woman and her two suitors.
Zhang Yimou helmed the best foreign-language film of the 1990s — Raise
the Red Lantern — and also was responsible for such powerful titles as
Ju Dou and To Live. These fascinating movies explored Chinese
history and culture in all its facets, and the results were so hard-hitting
that one of the films (Ju Dou) was even banned by that country’s authorities.
House of Flying Daggers is appealing eye candy, but here’s hoping that
Yimou goes back to making movies that can rattle a nation down to its core.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.
