SOMEONE CHECK IF HELL HATH FROZEN OVER.

I’m about to utter a sentence I never thought I’d live to hear myself say:

I did not absolutely love the new Jean-Pierre Jeunet film.

Oh man, I can’t believe I just said that. But it’s true. "A Very Long Engagement" is a very handsome movie. Jeunet clearly has his largest budget ever, and he re-creates 1920’s Europe on a convincing, epic scale. The war scenes at the infamous "Bingo" are as harrowing as they are muddy. The actors and actresses scattered throughout the movie are uniformly excellent. Make no mistake, Jean-Pierre Jeunet remains that true rarity of cinema: Hardy enough in stomach to stage grisly violence, but sensitive enough to ground his slaughterhouse in the whimsical daydreams of female protagonists. If any director, French or otherwise, could successfully stage a World War I epic / sweeping romance, Jeunet would be that guy. And if he had only stuck to staging a World War I epic / sweeping romance, I would be raving about his new flick right now.

But no! With "A Very Long Engagement," Jean-Pierre Jeunet is constantly screaming, "Look at me! Look at me! I’m Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of ‘Amelie,’ staging a World War I epic / sweeping romance!" There was no reason for him to do this. The story is potent enough, dramatic enough, and compelling enough to be told straight. Jeunet didn’t need to garnish it with so many of his hyperactive "Amelie" flourishes.

The voiceover that permeates the entire film? Totally unnecessary! The constant superimposing of murky images in mid-air, a la thought bubbles in comic books? Annoying after the tenth time! The ‘snapshots’ of minor characters, meaning their respective geneologies, even for soldiers who die the next time we see them? Could have been integrated in a much smoother manner! And the central romance between Audrey Tautou and ‘Whoever-that-guy-was,’ which naturally, had to border on anti-social behavior? Not nearly as cute as in "Amelie." Well, maybe that’s because the spectre of Death hangs so readily over Tautou’s character this time. Death lingers over the entire movie, in fact, but Jeunet can’t commit himself to adopting the uniformly serious tone the material deserves. (I don’t know if he intended the execution of a woman whom the audience can easily sympathize with, in self-consciously grainy black-and-white film stock, to be comic relief. It certainly felt off-putting.)

And the movie goes back to the pivotal campaign at "Bingo" so often that I started to get annoyed. Like I said, the war scenes are technically well-made. And I think Jeunet understands the "Rashoman" style: Every time you revisit the same scene, you look at it a different way, or new information comes to light, or something besides repetition. Still, there were too many times that the movie would cut back to the Battle at Bingo, and I’m not entirely convinced that each time, important new info was revealed, or anything at all changed. Maybe I need to see this movie a second time to be sure of the structure. But I had no problem with "Hero," (2002) or "Courage Under Fire," (1996) which took the same approach.

Finally, I thought this movie was a little too packed. Jodie Foster appears for about twenty minutes to tell the intriguing story of what lengths a soldier’s wife will go to for love. Her tale is meant to parallel Audrey’s, and Foster is awesome! She plays a weathered Frenchwoman, and disappears so completely into the role that I watched her for ten minutes before realizing who she was. Her character deserves her own movie, or at least a larger role. Remember Juliette Binoche in "The English Patient?" Similar dynamic, except Juliette’s character evolved alongside Ralph Fiennes’. She fell in love, then out of it, the same way the patient himself did. Foster’s Frenchwoman, on the contrary, makes her appearance, rules the screen for a short interval, then disappears forever. Ah, it’s too bad.

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Okay, the weekend's over. I'm going back to 1999, but you can read all my latest wacky time travel adventures here: 11/01/1999 - 11/30/1999