No Man's Land

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest is A Very Long Engagement. Jeunet will be most familiar here as the director of Alien 4, but has had bigger non-genre hits with Delicatessen and Amelie.

This tells the story of a girl played by Amelie’s Audrey Tautou who refuses to believe that her boyfriend has died in the WWI trenches, and sets out to find the full story. Like Jeunet’s previous movies, it’s a strange mix of Gallic humour and sentiment with big visuals and offbeat violence. The battle scenes are harrowing and unusual, and the post-war scenes are whimsical and poetic, leaving you wondering who the movie is aimed at, but it’s a beautifully made movie, even if the end is inevitable and it takes forever getting there.

Jodie Foster makes a very odd cameo appearance and the rest of the cast is composed of familiar faces from French cinema. The extras on the DVD are probably among the best I’ve seen and I can recommend this DVD to anyone, even the most cynical among you. Au revoir…

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

[imdb]0344510[/imdb]

DIY with Cecile De France

Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension (released in the UK as Switchblade Romance for some reason) is an intense and striking horror thriller, reminding me of the old Robert Fuest movie And Soon The Darkness, as two young girls wander about the French countryside, but it soon becomes painfully clear that what he’s doing is relocating ’70s US rural backwoods horror to an equivalent Gallic setting.

In particular, he takes Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre aesthetic and mixes it with an FPS-style array of weapons to beat the cast and audience to a gory mess. As you might have read, there’s an outrageous twist in the last ten minutes which stands the whole story on its head. Looking back, it makes no sense, even though it can be seen coming to some extent, and it also seems to have annoyed a few people in terms of the implications for the movie’s sexual politics.

Still, you shouldn’t let that put you off seeing the movie, as it’s nicely shot by Maxime Alexandre and beautifully paced. Cecile de France is excellent as the heroine, Maiwenn Le Besco screams well and Philippe Nahon cuts a frightening figure as the bloke in overalls with an extensive array of tools, even if it can hardly be called acting. And don’t worry about the subtitles as there’s virtually no dialogue.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

[imdb]0338095[/imdb]