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Very Long Engagement, A
EMAILPRINTWarner Independent Pictures

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 39 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 36 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Foreign | Mystery | Romance | War
Written by:
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Guillaume Laurant
Sébastien Japrisot (novel)
Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 26, 2004
DVD: July 12, 2005
Running Time: 134 minutes, Color
Origin: France
Summary
RATING: R for violence and sexuality
Starring Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Dominique Pinon, Clovis Cornillac, Jérôme Kircher, Chantal Neuwirth, Albert Dupontel, and Denis Lavant
An extraordinary love story set against the background of World War I.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Alien: Resurrection Amélie Delicatessen The City of Lost Children
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Rapturously beautiful, startlingly audacious and often very funny, the film employs many of the techniques that were used so pleasingly in "Amélie."
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
It's a magical film which manages to transport and rivet us in the same highly-imaginitive, breezily playful way "Amelie" did.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
Hauntingly tells a story older than the Odyssey and as timely as today's body count from Iraq.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
A unique and masterful film, filled with surprises and felicities and moments of transporting visual power.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.
Read Full Review >Variety Lisa Nesselson
Told with a blend of visual mastery and emotional intimacy, ambitious venture sustains a special melding of romance and pragmatism that should engage discerning audiences.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."
Read Full Review >Film Threat Michael Ferraro
The film is near perfect in its attempt to properly mix the irrationality of war in with an interesting love story.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
A long movie that almost wears out its 21/4-hour welcome, yet it's full of surprises.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
An epic treatment of epic themes that doesn't soft-soap its audience, but at the same time provides a terrifically satisfying entertainment.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Bernard Besserglik
Jeunet provides numerous pleasures, particularly visual, along the way.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Nathan
Inventive and lyrical, A Very Long Engagement is a joyous contradiction in terms: a war-torn romantic comedy.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
A Very Long Engagement is "Cold Mountain" with French people.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Certainly long and not always engaging and comes with a predictably basic ending, yet there are unexpected pleasures, moments of beauty and tiny pockets of joy to sustain you through the journey.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
It's an odd, initially jarring mixture of style and subject matter that works better as the film goes along.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The movie works amazingly well as a historical epic.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
There are many ways to say that war is hell, but few filmmakers have said it with as much imagination, humor, intrigue and humanity as Jean-Pierre Jeunet in A Very Long Engagement.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Longer than necessary, that is, for the story it has to tell. This flaw aside, the drama is well crafted and sometimes touching, with especially forceful opening scenes.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Starts slowly, but builds to a satisfying conclusion.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
The film is a trifle long too long for its rather slim mystery, but in face of so much beauty and invention that's a small quibble.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Mathilde's story is well enough handled by Jeunet to be endurable, and the rest of the film is a reward.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
It's just exhausting. For all of the movie's sumptuous, eyepopping craft, you'll feel more than a little relief when Mathilde finally reaches the end of her quest.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Sacrifices compelling drama for gratuitous whimsy and big-budget spectacle.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Engagement simply disappears inside its own enormous, intricate and ambitious design.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
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.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Jessica Winter
Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Melissa Levine
The result is nothing but allusive and memorial. And boring. This film is boring, at least partly because it is trying desperately to be big.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
The elements are all here for something spectacular and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 36 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Berti P. gave it a10:
A compelling film, wonderfully created, showing French cinema at its very best. It seems that some of the "American rewiews" have not understood this productions depth and style.
Tony B. gave it a6:
This is probably as effective an anti-war film as any since "Paths of Glory." However, it would have been an even better work of cinematic art if it had been shorter. Some scenes are repetitive and should have been eliminated; others would have been more effective if they were shorter.
Elton T gave it a6:
A very long... movie... So much of the movie could have been cut out without detracting from it.
Craigan U gave it an8:
A curious collision of Amelie and Saving Private Ryan, A Very Long Engagement is beautiful and jarring.
T. M. gave it a4:
A disappointing mess. Beautiful direction and cinematography, but no discernible story structure or characterization. As with "Amelie", I never felt the couple were truly in love. The subplot with Jodie Foster was far more interesting than the main plot.
Pat S. gave it a4:
Jeunet forgot to remember that in order to tell a love story, the viewer has to get the feeling that the protagonists are in fact in love. Overrated because it's french.
Chris M. gave it a9:
Jeunet captures the horrors of war with a rare talent. He is one of the few who dare telling a story.
