A very long engagement

(Herald rating: ****)

Amelie's Hepburn-clone star, Audrey Tautou, and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet are reunited for the first time since their quirky and unexpected hit in a romantic drama that touches some of their earlier bases but lacks its heart.

The film is set in two different periods - during World War I and just after it. In 1920, Mathilde lives with her guardians, Sylvain (Dominique Pinon) and Benedicte (Chantal Neuwirth) in a Brittany cottage.

Every day Mathilde waits for the village's eccentric postie, desperate for news of her boyfriend, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), who may or may not have died in the trenches in 1917. Finally, she hires a private detective (Ticky Holgado) to find out what happened to her sweetheart.

In the earlier story we find that Manech was one of five soldiers in his regiment court-martialled for cowardice after allegedly injuring themselves to escape the front lines. Instead of being shot, the five were sent to No Man's Land; presumably, like one of those medieval witchcraft trials, if they survived they were not guilty.

As the detective pieces the story together, a prostitute (Marion Cotillard) tries to take revenge on the officers and a Hollywood star with a well-known affection for France will turn up in a cameo as the wife of one of the lost men.

It's a long, ambitious movie with a Paris phonebook-full of characters and stories. Tatou's comparatively restrained performance is the highlight; the twin narratives lose their way at times and Jeunet's whimsical approach to one of humanity's most horrifying episodes may offend or upset some viewers.

On the 2-disk DVD, the 75-minute feature A Year At The Front is an epic Making of ... as Jeunet offers a fly-on-the-wall view of the shoot, especially the grand battle sequences. In Parisian Scenes, Jeunet explains why he had to build 120 sets and blew his budget to the point where the film could never recoup its costs. But you gotta love a guy who, as The Explosion shows, built a zeppelin and crashed it into a hospital. Finally there are 14 extended scenes and Jeunet's commentary, revealing his influences from The Godfather to A Fistful Of Dollars.

* DVD, Video rental out now