Comprehensive information and links about A Very Long Engagement

A Very Long Engagement A Very Long Engagement is a novel by Sebastien Japrisot, on which a 2004 film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and distributed by Warner Bros. is based. It is a fictional tale about a young woman's desperate search for her fiancé who might have been killed on a World War I battlefield (the Somme).

The film's tagline is

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 trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but 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. 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 in flashback to the battlefield.

Controversy

The "nationality" of the film has been of some controversy. French films are subsidized by the government through the Centre National de la Cinématographie, and the makers have applied for a US$4.3 million grant. However, rival filmmakers do not 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.

Awards and nominations

The film was nominated for two Oscars, but did not win any. It was not eligible for the Best Foreign-Language Film award.

The initials MMM are carved several times by Manech, the fiancé of the heroine Mathilde. They stand for ("loves"A Very Long Engagement is pronounced the same as the letter M. In the English subtitles, the initials were preserved by substituting the wording "Manech's Marrying Mathilde".The Albatross aircraft featured was made by the German company Albatros Flugzeugwerke. (Correction: it was an American Stearman as flying Albatrosses are no longer to be found, cf director's commentary)