« Help Me Raise Money for the American Heart Association
Main
Wednesday is new comics day »

The latest film from Amelie's Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his muse Audrey Tautou is a more serious film as it is set amidst the horrors of World War I but it still contains the whimsical narrative touches that made Amelie so great. It is of course, filmed with a precise sense of design and beauty. The WWI scenes are brutally staged with post-Saving Private Ryan intensity but with a touch of fantasy and hope. The story is all about never giving up hope as Tautou's character searches for definitive proof that her fiance was indeed killed during a court-martial on the battlefield.

Unfortunately the plot relies a lot on Tautou meeting with various people to hear stories of what actually happened to her fiance and three other men that were condemned and supposedly killed with him. You have to keep track of a lot of names as these stories are relayed and surprisingly there isn't as many visual cues to help you out as you'd expect from Jeunet. This made things a little confusing at times for me but overall I was still very much taken in by it.

Posted at August 14, 2005 01:03 PM