The Country of Lost Children

If you watch the trailer to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, you'll see a sweeping love story set during wartime and shot from some interesting angles. You'll see Audrey Tautou's cute bob haircut and adorable doey eyes.

So it's a bit jarring when the film begins in a muddy trench with a parade of five soldiers about to be executed for self-mutilation. Before the star actress is even introduced, men have been shot in the head, shot in the hand, drowned in mud, bathed in the exploded guts of their comrades, and driven insane. It gets worse — a syringe full of syphilis-infected blood, a hydrogen-filled zeppelin exploding in a hospital ward, a guillotined body perfunctorily dumped into a too-short coffin. And, in the midst of so much brutality, there is a sweeping love story set during wartime and shot from some very interesting angles.

If I could be any filmmaker in the world, I would be Jean-Pierre Jeunet. His career has been as eclectic as it has been erratic: it's hard to say with any sincerity that I wish I'd made Alien Resurrection; and though I describe The City of Lost Children as one of my favorite movies, I then go on to explain that I've never been able to stay awake through the whole thing. My envy of him is misplaced: part of Jeunet's charm is that no one else could have made City of Lost Children; his films are filtered through a lens that is unique to him.

But the larger part of his charm comes from his unabashed love of the sublime. Amélie was an homage to the minute loveliness of life, a lavishing of attention on whimsical details. A Very Long Engagement does the same, though it trades Amélie's bright colors and Parisian accordions for the gray skies and gory mud of the trenches of World War I. But, oh, votre pays a une saleté vraiment charmante!

One wonders why Jeunet would make a lavish war film, bankrolled largely by the United States, at a time when the French and the U.S. are very much at odds about the merit of a certain current war. The project was funded by a "coalition of the willing" — Warner Independent Pictures in the United States, and Warner French and a newly-formed 2003 Production in France. But it was criticized in that nation for not being "French enough", instead seen as another example of America's bullying cultural imperialism. It's a shame, because Jeunet makes France look beautiful at every opportunity. He does not, however, feel the same aesthetic obligation to war. Though the story has its share of bravery and heroism, they come from the places you might least expect — one condemned man carries another on his back to safety; a compassionate German woman helps the story's heroine track down the very soldiers who killed her brother. Conversely, the film is less than inspiring about the glory of war and its "band of brothers": its worst atrocities are performed by the French, upon the French. (The five men condemned to death for treasonous self-mutilation are simply thrown into the "no man's land" between the trenches, and left to fend for themselves against the shelling, strafing and land mines; one of the five gets gunned down by a French sniper who seems annoyed that the man is still alive.)

Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan tries to depict war with so much brutal detail that we can call it "honest," but in the end, it could still be used as an Army recruitment reel: its heroes are heroic, and though war is hell, the Americans give 'em hell, too. The scene in Jeunet's film that most evokes Spielberg has the French storming across the no-man's land toward the German trench, brandishing bayonets against the German machine guns, and getting slaughtered almost to the man. The charge lacks the bald derring-do of Private Ryan: it isn't made for the sake of a rescue, or some larger strategic gain; it doesn't have much purpose at all, except that the commander reasons it's better to die while attacking than while cowering in a hole. Jeunet drives this pointlessness home when he returns to this same hard-fought tract of land a few years later: it is an innocuous field of wildflowers. There's nothing there, no single sign of what should have been indelible carnage. All those lives were spent almost without a trace.

The City of Lost Children is a fantasia about a scientist who is unable to dream and, to make up for the deficiency, kidnaps children to steals theirs. So, too, is A Very Long Engagement. It dresses up as a war movie, but at its heart, it's as full of sweeping allegory and metaphysical wonder, and just as concerned with the stolen dreams of youth. It's easy to see in the long, slow final shot of the film that Jeunet is doing his best to assure that the children get their dreams back. The children are limping and scarred, but they have won the war.