A Very Long Engagement

A Very Long Engagement (, "A long Sunday of engagement") is a 2004 French-American romantic war drama film, co-written and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel and Marion Cotillard. It is a fictional tale about a young woman's desperate search for her fiancé who might have been killed during World War I. It was based on the 1991 novel of the same name by Sébastien Japrisot. The film was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography at the 77th Academy Awards. Marion Cotillard won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance, and Gaspard Ulliel won the César Award for Most Promising Actor. Plot Five French soldiers are convicted of self-mutilation in order to escape military service during World War I. They are condemned to face near-certain death in no man's land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but Mathilde, the fiancée of one of the soldiers, refuses to give up hope and begins to uncover clues as to what actually took place on the battlefield. She is all the while driven by the constant reminder of what her fiancé had carved into one of the bells of the church near their home, MMM for Manech aime Mathilde (Manech loves Mathilde; a pun on the French word aime, which is pronounced like the letter "M". In the English-language version, this is changed to "Manech's marrying Mathilde"). Along the way, she discovers the brutally corrupt system used by the French government to deal with those who tried to escape the front. She also discovers the stories of the other men who were sentenced to no man's land as a punishment. She, with the help of a private investigator, Germain Pire, attempts to find out what happened to her fiancé. The story is told both from the point of view of the fiancée in Paris and the French countryside—mostly Brittany—of the 1920s, and through flashbacks to the battlefield.