Romantic quest

In John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, Dr Greenslade explains his theory of successful thriller writing to Richard Hannay: ‘Let us take three things a long way apart,’ he says, ‘an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard. Not much connection between the three? You invent a connection.’

Jean-Pierre Jeunet would find Dr Greenslade’s examples tame stuff. For his formula, he takes a tuba player with a flatulent dog, a vengeful Corsican prostitute with death-dealing eyeglasses, a hospital housed in a giant zeppelin hangar, a postman who bicycles through his customers’ kitchens, a barkeeper with an intricately hand-carved hand, a guy whose dying wish is to urinate standing up, a punning detective, and a couple of dozen other curiosities, and invents a connection.

The director struck gold with Audrey Tautou and the relentless gamine quirkiness of Amelie, and it would be foolish to expect him to eschew either his star or his style for his next venture. What’s new is the connective material: the first world war. The English title of his film — A Very Long Engagement — has a double meaning: the deferred nuptials of Mathilde (Mlle Tautou) and her missing fiancé Manech, and the ultimate long engagement between the eternally entrenched combatants of the Western Front, whose bloody ping-pong across a few hundred yards of mud ought to remind some of the hysterical old queens in today’s media what a real quagmire looks like.

So the trick is to make the Amelie approach — the accumulation of eccentric detail — work on the big canvas of history. We open in a gloomy Great War trench, though one endowed with the Jeunetesque moniker of Bingo-Crepuscule.