A Very Long Engagement

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) opened in 2004, three years after Jeunet's massive international success with Amélie, and reunited him with Audrey Tautou and most of his earlier production team. The film won five Césars including Best Cinematography (Bruno Delbonnel) and Best Set Design, and was nominated for two Academy Awards. Adapted from Sébastien Japrisot's 1991 novel of the same name.

Mathilde (Tautou) is a young Parisian woman whose fiancé Manech disappeared in the trenches of the First World War in 1917. Officially he was executed alongside four other soldiers for self-inflicted wounds (a court-martialled mutiny) but Mathilde refuses to believe he is dead. Across the post-war 1920s she conducts a stubborn, painstakingly detailed investigation across the surviving witnesses, family members and hospital records of the four other condemned men, slowly assembling a more complete picture of what actually happened on the night.

The film operates as both a war investigation and a sustained love story; Jeunet's collaboration with Bruno Delbonnel produced some of the most distinctive period photography of 2000s European cinema (sepia-and-amber trenches, sunlit Parisian interiors, autumnal countryside). Marion Cotillard, in a small but pivotal supporting role, was nominated for the BAFTA on the strength of three scenes, a performance that helped lead to La Vie en Rose and the rest of her international career.