If you like battleground carnage delivered with aesthetic brio, the kind that ensures that when a soldier explodes into confetti his flesh will dapple a trenchmate as decoratively as pink rosettes on a cake, the new French film A Very Long Engagement will serve you nicely. Set during World War I and directed by the cult favorite Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the film follows the adventures of a young woman, Mathilde, played by Audrey Tautou, who holds fast to the hope that her fiance will return home. Even when death seems to do them part, the cord of her love remains unbroken.
Like the book on which it's based -- by the crime novelist and screenwriter Jean-Baptiste Rossi -- who wrote under the name Sebastien Japrisot, A Very Long Engagement opens with five French soldiers snaking through muddy trenches. It's January 1917, three years into the Great War, and the men are marching toward death, having been court-martialed for self-mutilation. Among the five is Mathilde's young fiance, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), a gentle creature called Cornflower, who had been reduced to a catatonic state after an explosion covered him in another man's blood and viscera. It's a scene that Japrisot captures quickly and without embellishment: "He'd spat out the horror and shrieked his head off." Soon after he stops screaming, Manech is tossed onto the battlefield and left for dead.
Several years later, after the trenches of Europe have been turned into manicured graveyards, Mathilde learns that Manech may still be alive.
Springing into action, somewhat cumbersomely since polio has left her with one lame leg, she begins searching for her fiance, poring through letters and over clues, and tracking down anyone who can explain what happened and why. With the pluck of Nancy Drew and the cunning of Hercule Poirot, she digs into the histories of the other condemned men, inquiries that take her from her bucolic oceanside home all the way to bustling Paris. Slowly, slowly, very slowly, Mathilde peels away the layers of memory and misdirection provided by the four men's friends and lovers, eventually uncovering some kind of truth.
Best known for Amelie, a modern fairy tale also starring Tautou, Jeunet is in the possession of a distinctive visual style developed during his longtime collaboration with his former filmmaking partner, Marc Caro. In films like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, both released in the 1990s, the two men fashioned meticulous dark worlds that were part Rube Goldberg, part FAO Schwarz, and generally enjoyable for about 15 minutes. Watching gears and wheels whir inside a clock, no matter how precisely calibrated the mechanism, quickly loses its appeal, and the same is true of these films. The collaborators parted ways when Jeunet went solo to direct the fourth and most miserable installment of the Alien franchise, a debacle that was soon forgotten with the international success of Amelie.
With A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet has again proved himself an admirable watchmaker. Armed with an enormous bag of special-effects tricks, he recreates a bygone era with digital wizardry, manic energy, a fastidious attention to detail and only the faintest of heartbeats. Unlike children who bring even the most chewed-up teddy bear to life, Jeunet shows no interest in animating the characters in his dollhouse world, and even Mathilde and her tears remain fundamentally decorative, as arid as the computer-assisted cinematography.
Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life. Watching this woman discover and then lose love, her eyes crinkling as delicately as tissue paper, do you at last feel the human touch. An existential romance by way of mystery, Japrisot's novel is at once about the horror of war and a woman's refusal to surrender to its madness, and is unequivocally human from first page to last.
Like most viewers, I went to see this film still under the charm of Amelie but hesitant due to the historical setting (WWI), which I thought would jar with Jeunet's neo-romantic cinematic style. Also I thought it would be tough for Audrey Tautou to shake off the girly endearment portrayed in Amelie, a cuteness that would presumably be misplaced in a film about war. Jeunet finesses these premature worries, however, and the result is an elegant film.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s