A Very Long Engagement

A Very Long Engagement French Un long dimanche de fianailles is a 2004 French romantic war film, cowritten and directed by JeanPierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou. It is a fictional tale about a young womans desperate search for her fianc who might have been killed during World War I. It was based on a novel of the same name, written by Sebastien Japrisot, first published in 1991.

Five French soldiers are convicted of selfmutilation in order to escape military service during World War I. They are condemned to face near certain death in the no mans land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but Mathilde, the fiance 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 fianc 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 Englishlanguage version, this is changed to Manechs 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 the no mans land as a punishment. She, with the help of a private investigator, attempts to find out what happened to her fianc. The story is told both from the point of view of the fiance in Paris and the French countrysidemostly Brittanyof the 1920s, and through flashbacks to the battlefield. ........

Source: Wikipedia