Python Hyena A Very Long Engagement (2004): Dir: Jean Pierre Jeunet / Cast: Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Dominique Pinon, Chantal Neuwirth, Marion Cotillard: Powerful film about the timeless connection between two individuals as well as the venture for facts. Set during the first World War five soldiers are sent into no-man's land after inflicting themselves with gunshot wounds. One of them is a young nineteen year old whose fiancée searches drastically for answers to his fate. She cannot accept that he is dead because she claims that she cannot feel it. Brilliantly directed by Jean Pierre Jeunet who previously made a morbid piece of trash called Alien: Resurrection, which nearly killed that franchise. Then he wisely followed that up with the wonderful Amelie, which also starred Audrey Tautou. She proves valuable as the leg impaired fiancée with a strong will. Gaspard Ulliel plays her fiancée who suffers from shell shock. Dominique Pinon and Chantal Neuwirth play her supportive aunt and uncle whom she lives with. Marion Cotillard is sexy using her dominance to tie an enemy to a bed and then shooting the mirror overhead for a nasty end. Visually tense war footage places viewers within the chaos. It gives off the corrupt and fatal remains of war and its impact while others desire to avoid the fatalities altogether and seek the solitude that is a distant memory. Score: 10 / 10

Sanjhbati M This film is directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou ( famous for the movie Amilie ), This french film Got 7.8/10 ( IMDb rating ) and 85% vote ( Rotten Tomato ). It is based on Drama | Mystery | Romance , & won more than 30 awards on that time. Plot - Five French 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 Mathilde, 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. She is all the while driven by the constant reminder of what her fiancé had carved into one of the bells of the church near their home, MMM for Manech Aime Mathilde (Manech Loves Mathilde; a pun on the French word aime, which is pronounced like the letter "M". In the English-language version, this is changed to "Manech's Marrying Mathilde"). Along the way, she discovers the brutally corrupt system used by the French government to deal with those who tried to escape the front. She also discovers the stories of the other men who were sentenced to the no man's land as a punishment. She, with the help of a private investigator, attempts to find out what happened to her fiancé. 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 through flashbacks to the battlefield.

billcr12 Audrey Tautou proves once again that she is one of the very few actresses alive able to carry a film on her shoulders. As Mathilde, a twenty year old young lady, determined to prove her fiancé is alive, after hearing that he has died during a battle as a French soldier with Germans, she spends all of her time and most of her money on that mission.Manech is one of five soldiers sentenced to death during World War I, and while a bloody battle in a trench surrounds a chaotic situation, an officer comes up with the idea to set the five condemned men to walk out towards the Germans on the other side of the fire fight. The rest of the story alternates between war scenes and a mystery led by Mathilde and a detective she has hired to find Manech, who she believes to the point of obsession, is alive. The story is a puzzle, which deserves complete attention from the viewer. Tautou is so compelling and believable as the woman in love, that I could watch her read from a phone book, and never lose interest. The script is excellent and the sets exquisite, and director Jean Pierre Jeunet's eye for detail is perfect. A Very Long Engagement is a very good movie.

philipfoxe I'm pretty hard to please when it comes to film so I am so pleased that French cinema exists. I just can't even watch Hollywood films anymore. They are even contriving 'indie' films now, and the soul has been relentlessly driven out of everything that issues forth so that the best of it is just not too trite and sentimental. When a French film is sentimental it actually brings tears to your eyes. This film is about a lot of things; the imagined innocence of childhood; the reality of growing up; the kindness of strangers; the tragedy and pain of happiness ripped away. We peep over the shoulder of our protagonist, praying for her hopes to be realised but wanting to say to her 'I'm sorry my little one, so sorry ,but life must go on' In the midst of it all, the barbarity and corruption of War-its utter pointlessness and criminality. We see the damage it does to all the humans involved; there are no heroes involved, just real human lives being torn to shreds. And what else? Ah yes. Poignancy, humour and life.