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.
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