Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Un long dimanche de fiançailles | A Very Long Engagement (2004)

 

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Un long dimanche de fiançailles is full of intense visual images, although nothing like the flash images in Jeunet's previous Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain. With Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) searching for her man lost in World War I – Manech Langonnet (Gaspard Ulliel) – we are some distance from the cutseyness of the previous film.

Several times we find ourselves in the trenches of the Somme, where five soldiers were accused of self-mutilation in order to escape from the insanity. They were left to the no man's land of Bingo crépuscule separating the French and the Germans, and all were killed one way or another. No doubt.

Although Mathilde refuses to recognises this, as she knows that she would know if he were dead. So she uses archives, a private detective, information she can glean from survivors, any means possible to find out what happened to Manech. And, gloriously, she finds him, although he's lost his memory and seems to have lost a degree of his intelligence. Does it matter? We'll never know.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's La Cité des enfants perdus | The City of Lost Children (2005)

 

The prominent American film critic Roger Ebert was very enthusiastic about the design and visuals of La Cité des enfants perdus, although the plot escaped him. This doesn't surprise me: I'd call the film something of a whiz-bang steampunk nightmare.

This film, coming four years after Delicatessen (1991), is the second and final co-directed film with Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Alien, la résurrection (1997) is the only Jeunet film I've not seen, although (certainly with the exception of Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009)) he has more recently tended to move away from the steampunk atmospheres.

Krank (Daniel Emilfork) lives on a disused offshore oilrig with clones of Dominique Pinon (one of Jeunet's acteurs fétiches), the very weird Martha (Mireille Mossé), 'Uncle Irvin' (a brain in a fish tank with the voice of Jean-Louis Trintignant) can't dream and is ageing. He seeks to kidnap children in order to steal their dreams. I could go on but it gets crazier and crazier.

Miette (the nine-year-old Monique Vittet) is for me the only saving grace of the film, but that's not saying a great deal about this disaster. After the brilliant Delicatessen, this is a very weird follow-up by a director who later came up with much better: an unfortunate blip.

NB. It could be that my lack of appreciation for this film was the impossibility for me to it listen to it in the original language, although I have my doubts.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs | Micmacs à tire-larigot (2013)

Micmacs is the English name for the French film Micmacs à tire-larigot, a title which is difficult to translate: 'Carry-ons Galore', 'Endless Carry-ons', I don't know. But this of course is a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie, and his movies are difficult even to describe. There's a great deal of imagination at work here, and to a great extent I'd describe Jeunet's films as dream-like, so what can you say?

You can begin by saying that the name of the film has been a little slant in French, with the expression à tire-larigot used as a pun to mean that the carry-ons or whatever you choose to call them are actually in a place called Tire-Larigots, a kind of cave made out of scrapyard or recycled material. And in this cave live some lovable troglodytes, such as the African Remington (Omar Sy) with his typewriter, who only uses outmoded expressions; or Calculette (Marie-Julie Baup), who can make fantastic calculations almost instantly; or Fracasse (Dominique Pinon), a former human cannon ball; or Placard (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who's survived the guillotine; or La Môme Caoutchouc (Julie Ferrier), a contortionist; or Petit-Pierre (Michel Crémadès), a character based on the real art brut genius of the same name; or Tambouille (Yolande Moreau), the band's delightful (but not-to-be-messed-with) cook.

Into this motley crew comes Bazil (Dany Boon), who's recently lost his home and his job in a video club* due to being in hospital for some time after receiving a stray bullet to his skull, which is still there as surgeons fear that it might do more damage if removed. Bazil's father lost his life in a land mine explosion, so Bazil's not happy when he discovers himself in the middle of the road between two arms companies: 'La Vigilante de l'Armement' and 'Les Arsenaux d'Aubervilliers': the first killed his father, and the second made the bullet in his head. Obviously, time for some micmacs. This is, as might be expected of Jean-Paul Jeunet, an amazing film.

*It was of course a video club in which Nino worked in Amélie Poulain, or where Quentin Tarantino worked for that matter.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet (2013)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to make a film with a non-original script, and Reif Larsen’s novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009) was introduced to him, from which he adapted his English-language The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet, which was almost entirely set in Québec. It was an unsuccessful film: Harvey Weinstein wanted Jeunet to make cuts, Jeunet refused, and the film went out with virtually no publicity and to very few movie theaters in the United States. According to Jeunet there was also a contract with Netflix to fulfill, but we'll leave it there.

The ten-year-old Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, commonly known as T. S. Spivet, or just "T. S." (Kyle Catlett) is a child prodigy, although his teachers fail to recognise it and his parents and sister, well... The family lives far from high cultural territory, on a farm in Montana where his unnamed cowboy father obviously expects him to carry on the business, his mother Dr Clair (Helena Bonham Carter) is too interested in grasshoppers and insects to really concern herself with T. S., his sister Gracie (Niamh Wilson) is too interested in fashion, pop music and becoming famous and his brother Layton (Jakob Davies) accidentally shot himself.

But child prodigy T. S. certainly is: the Smithsonian Institute in Washington phones him to tell him he's won the Baird prize for his invention of a perpetual motion machine, and he's due to give a speech about it, but of course no one knows he's so young. The whole film is a visual feast, as you would expect from Jeunet, and we are still in the dream world he creates (meeting the tramp Dominique Pinon, for instance). From train hopping to hitching, T. S. makes it to the Smithsonian, gives a speech mainly about the death of his brother, is 'interviewed' by a mindless television presenter until his mother Dr Clair comes on the programme, then after that his father floors the presenter and they go home: they don't want their son to be manipulated by the media. but the best use of T. S.'s invention is to rock his mother's cradle for the new baby?

Larsen's book is experimental, and Jeunet tries to meet this experimentation by various diagrams in the film, various maps included in the visuals, etc. I wouldn't call this a fully accomplished movie as the ending is so unsatisfactory, the story just seems to fizzle out, but then professional criticisms of the novel mainly concern the rather inconclusive end.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen (1991)

How exactly do you begin to describe this first feature? The headline of an edition of the weekly L'Express seemed to see it as a French Monty Python, and then quite rightly set the issue straight by saying that the film is like nothing ever seen: agreed, as to compare it with Monty Python would be a grave insult to this highly inventive movie. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where transactions are by barter (such as in chick peas), the subdued colours of brown and dark yellow predominate and reflect on the dismal, sordid and terrifying world depicted (which is incidentally at the same time highly amusing). Almost everything seems to come from a former age. Louison (Dominique Pinon), a former circus clown whose partner was a chimpanzee, has applied for a job with butcher Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who in fact deals in human flesh and finds Louison to be meagre fare.

Clapet's daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) falls for him, and there is a scene in which she invites him for tea, and although she bungles everything by not wearing her glasses Lousison isn't put out in his equal enthusiasm for her. But the tenants of the building in general are frightened of receiving the butcher's knife, and the atmosphere is tense.

The tenants are a bizarre assortment of characters: the brothers who make boxes which when turned make a sound like a cow (boîtes à meuh); the man who, in his flat-cum-swamp, raises frogs and snails; the woman who devises extremely elaborate (but unsuccessful) means of killing herself, etc. We mustn't forget, of course, the men that the worried Julie gets into contact with: 'les troglodistes', who are vegetarians plotting rebellion in the sewers.

Needless to say, the finale of Delicatessen is an apocalypse in itself, with the lovers Louison and Julie playing musical saw and cello on the roof of the building. A French cinema classic surely more inventive than Amélie Poulain?

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Foutaises (1990)

Foutaises, meaning something of little or no importance or use, 'stars' Dominique Pinon simply listing his likes and dislikes. For instance, he likes opening a book after his holidays and finding sand betweens the leaves; putting his socks on; leaving for holidays (although the holidays themselves are unmentioned); the Bois de Boulogne on bank holidays; taking escalators the wrong way, etc, etc. But he hates butchers' stalls; pulling out nose hairs (with tweezers); leaving a single pea on his plate; bearded men without mustaches; dead Christmas trees in January; the end of television programmes, etc. This eight-minute film is obviously a series of lists, as underlined early on in the shot of the open pages of Georges Perec's Je me souviens, in which he lists things he remembers.

There's something of Asperger's syndrome here (which of course we all have to a certain extent), but most of all there are some embryonic opening scenes of Jeunet's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain | Amelie (2001)

OK, another moan about the translation, but what a leap from Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain to simple Amelie, without even an accent on the 'e', as if a British or an American audience would be put off knowing the film is French, or even worse by realising that it is subtitled. Mercifully, my DVD didn't come with subtitles, so I have no idea what horrors they hold.

This is in fact the third time I've watched this film, and each time it still seems fresh, reminding me of a number of things I'd forgotten. But it's difficult to know where to start just by mentioning a few sentences that sum up this movie that is so well known and in a sense crazy: the humour comes from the characters and following on from that from their actions, not particularly from the words used here. In such a way, it's easy to understand the movie's huge success abroad: this is not slapstick, but the actions make it a modern relation to Tati's films, even go back to Chaplin or Keaton. What is obvious is that the characters are an exaggeration of similar characters we know in 'real life', even of ourselves.

Sometimes Amélie (Audrey Tautou), an outsider in that she was educated at home because it was thought that she had a bad heart, can be mischievous and play games on people she doesn't like: as a young girl she secretly annoys a neighbour by climbing on the roof and interferes with his TV aerial during an important football match he's watching; in the same spirit (now grown up) she doesn't like the way the local greengrocer humiliates his assistant, so she gains entrance to his house to wreak gentle and harmless havoc, although he does at times appear to doubt his  own sanity. Mainly, though, Amélie does good.

The beginning of Amélie's activities as a do-gooder (in the most positive sense of the term) is when finds an old box of children's treasures in a hole in the skirting board of her bathroom. Finding out the man's name is Dominique Bretodeau is just the first part of the detective work, but she eventually manages to track him down, but is too timid to reveal herself: she leaves the box in a telephone booth which she phones as he passes, he is overjoyed to discover it, and (still not revealing herself) follows him into a bar and listens to him tell the barkeepers his amazing story.

From then on she continues the good work: she brings her grieving, widowed father back to life by borrowing his precious garden gnome and having an air hostess post shots of the gnome from various places in the world; her concierge Madeleine has been depressive since her husband's death forty years before, but Amélie fakes a letter 'written' by him and 'lost in the post', thus inspiring fresh life into Madeleine; and she brings together the tobacconist and lottery ticket seller Georgette (Isabelle Nanty) and Joseph (Dominique Pinon). But this is all vicarious, and her personal life is devoted to others.

Georgette and Joseph, er, come together in Le Café des 2 moulins in Rue Lepic, the windmills being the Moulin Rouge and the Moulin de la Galette, both of which are in Montmartre, where much of Amélie Poulain is set, and the café is where Amélie works. I took the photo below in September 2018. 

The principal story within the stories of the movie, though, concerns Amélie's fascination with, and eventual love for, Nino (Mathieux Kassovitz), who works in a sex shop and rides a bécane. His obsession is collecting photos customers have rejected from Photomatons on the métro, often tearing them up. By chance Amélie finds an album Nino has made containing these photos (often pieced together), and is inevitably smitten.

The story of how Amélie and Nino get together is beyond the scope of this comment, but this is a wondrous film, as indeed are probably the majority of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's films, although so far I've only seen Un long dimanche de fiançailles and Delicatessen.

 

Audrey Tautou in the 18th arrondissement

Anyone reading my blog will be aware of how much I detest tourism, but occasionally you just have to ignore the tourists and do your thing. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's brilliant movie Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulin (2001), boringly Anglicized to Amelie, has a number of scenes set in the Café des 2 Moulins, rue Lepic, Montmartre. As expected, there are shots of the actor Audrey Tautou on the walls, although I suspect that the vast majority of people who know this movie just prefer to take an outside shot of this place, whose interior isn't entirely recognisable from the film.