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Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet teams up again with his Amelie star, the winsome Audrey Tautou, for this unusual and engrossing film, which is part detective story, part romance, and part wartime drama. Tautou portrays Mathilde, a young orphan determined to discover whether her lover and childhood sweetheart, 19-year-old infantryman Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), actually died after being sentenced to death during World War I. Securing the services of a quirky Parisian investigator (Ticky Holgado) and forcing a lawyer friend of her late father's to help, the girl pursues every clue and learns that Manech’s fate may have been linked to something more than the crime with which he was charged. Mathilde’s search for the truth throws light on the darker military and political practices of those years, but Jeunet isn’t content to make Engagement a “message” film. He places great emphasis on sequences of revenge in which the officers responsible for Manech’s condemnation are dispatched one by one. The story is a thriller, yet Jeunet mutates the form by employing horrifying and viscerally affecting war scenes, showing trenches under bombardment and soldiers being mowed down by machine-gun fire. Obvious care was taken with this production, and that care is primarily manifested in carefully designed visuals that reflect differences in time and place. Brittany and the French countryside radiate an idyllic golden glow, while primary colors are absent from the trenches and battlefields. Paris is rendered as picturesquely as in vintage postcards. But the best visual effect is Tautou, whose marvelously expressive face always lets us know exactly what she is thinking and feeling. Complicated scripting and meticulous direction aside, this lovely and able actress makes this Engagement very special. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

Audrey Tautou, who rose to international stardom with the title role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's worldwide smash Amélie, reunites with the director for this drama, set during the darkest days of World War I and its immediate aftermath. Mathilde (Tautou) is a pretty but frail young women who was left with a bad leg after a childhood bout with polio. Mathilde lives in a small French village with her Aunt Bénédicte (Chantal Neuwirth) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon), and is engaged to marry Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), the son of a lighthouse keeper who is fighting with the army near the German front. Manech is one of five soldiers who have been accused of injuring themselves in order to be sent home; in order to discourage similar behavior among their comrades, Manech and the other soldiers are sentenced to death, and the condemned men are marched into the no man's land between the French and German lines, where they are certain to be killed. Mathilde receives word of Manech's death, but in her heart she believes that if the man she loved had been killed, she would know it and feel it. Convinced he's still alive somewhere, Mathilde hires a private detective (Ticky Holgado) shortly after the end of the war, and together they set out to find the missing Manech. Jodie Foster appears in a supporting role as a Polish expatriate living in France. Mark Deming

Time Magazine

Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one. Richard Corliss

Chicago Sun-Times

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. Roger Ebert

Chicago Tribune

It's a magical film which manages to transport and rivet us in the same highly-imaginitive, breezily playful way "Amelie" did. Michael Wilmington

Product Details

• UPC: 085393897222
• Source: WARNER HOME VIDEO
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Language: Français
• Subtitles: English
• Editions: Subtitled
• Time: 2:13:00
• Sales Rank: 2,093

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• International Cinema Collection

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