This movie lines up five distinctive characters in a row, gives you all their names, then proceeds to mix them all up in a dizzying fashion, like a cinematic shell game. Your task is follow the one with the German boots. Or the psychotic girlfriend. Or the red mitten … ack! I’m afraid I failed, especially given the added task of reading subtitles. At least there’s some nice cinematography and Audrey Tautou to look at while you scratch your head.
2 responses to “Movie: A Very Long Engagement (2004)”
I do love Audry Tautou, and this movie sounds a little better than my last Netflix movie, a French film called The Chorus, about a teacher in a rowdy boys school who gets them singing (and, of course, behaving). It was fairly predictable, following the genre to the letter, but the letter was in French, without subtitles. I know a little French but this was machine-gun delivery. There must be someplace on these foreign films that lets one know whether or not you get a little help with the dialogue?
There’s a language setup menu on most DVDs. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, I don’t know…
The Very Long Engagement, to keep up with the modern war movie trend, has pretty gritty, horrifying war scenes.