As a young guy with a degree in film, I’m supposed to be up on French cinema. I’m supposed to have written at least a handful of papers about the brilliance of the French, and how they make those American dogs in Hollywood look like so much poo. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, and save for a handful of Jean-Luc Goddard pictures I’ve enjoyed, I really don’t claim to be either an expert on or an aficionado of French film. So perhaps I’m somewhat ill-equipped to review Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement. Perhaps I should just call it “A triumph!” simply by virtue of its being French.

If that’s what you want to hear, you can probably stop reading now, because I’m about to say what I really thought: that while A Very Long Engagement richly deserved the awards for cinematography it received, it is not a triumph. Sadly, it is a mere good movie. I should warn you, however, that there has never been a more aptly named film (with the possible exception of Movie, Movie—but I digress), in that it simply feels long, particularly to an American viewer. In the European tradition of filmmaking, it emphasizes photography over storytelling, and it is an expressive and beautiful film, but it gets a bit tiresome to try to watch the beautiful cinematography and the English subtitles at the same time, while being only mildly entertained by the plot (though we can thank Warner Independent for not foolishly trying to create a dubbed version).

The plot, such as it is, is set in France during and directly following World War I. Mathilde (played by Audrey Tautou, who previously collaborated with Jeunet on Amélie) is believed to have lost her fiancé Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) in the war, supposedly sentenced to death for self-mutilation (in an attempt to escape military service). Military records and conventional wisdom say he is dead, but Mathilde refuses to believe them and hires a private detective to help her track him down. We watch this play out for the remainder of the film, and it is only somewhat interesting, seeing as we know the end if we’ve know the film’s title (unless “engagement” is taken to mean a military action—a pun that doesn’t work in the French title, anyway). There’s a subplot involving murder and intrigue, but it involves characters that Jeunet barely bothers to introduce to us, so it works as a mystery more in the sense of what-the-heck’s-going-on than in the traditional “whodunit” sense.

As I’ve said, the film works well on a visual level, with the French countryside painted in warm sepia tones, and the ragged battlefields in harsh grays, drawing a compelling contrast between the physical isolation of Mathilde’s lighthouse home and the emotional isolation of Manech’s battlefields. This is a world without nuance, though, where sex and nature are almost completely romanticized and military action is roundly condemned as harmful to all involved and unnecessary (no arguments here, for the most part—but this sort of purposeful naïveté has been done before, and better). Strangely, violence directed in opposition to war, such as self-mutilation or murderous revenge against generals and bureaucrats, is romanticized along with the sex, suggesting perhaps that two wrongs make a right.

If the film is hard to watch, it’s because we simply don’t care that much if Matilde finds Manech in the end. She’s a compelling heroine, a plucky polio survivor who is skilled at tuba (!!!), and will stop at nothing to find her true love; he, however, is hardly given any screen time at all, and ends up being little more than a pretty boy. One could argue that the film is really about women’s experience of the war and not men’s—but since we don’t know Manech, we don’t care if he’s found, and we can’t help but wonder if Mathilde’s obsessive search is a little misguided. In any case, those who show up for the sentimental ending will likely not enjoy the scenes of bloody violence (and vice versa); those who come for the sex scenes are better off renting Showgirls for the umpteenth time.