Trench feat

IT'S easy to dismiss A Very Long Engagement as Amelie goes to war as it reunites director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and star Audrey Tautou from one of the most successful French films of all time. Amelie introduced Tautou as a young French girl who went around spreading happiness in a whimsical comedy very different to Jeunet's previous Delicatessen and his Hollywood foray with Alien: Resurrection.

The delightful Tautou came to Britain to star in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things and now A Very Long Engagement sees her back with Jeunet for an epic love story set against the background of World War One. Mathilde refuses to believe that her love Manech died in the trenches and embarks on a journey to find him.

No matter how different the character, Tautou knows that comparisons with Amelie will always be made. "I don't feel frustrated by Amelie. I understand, I think it's fair. The actress playing Mathilde looks the same as the one in Amelie. But I have no confusion about it. I never compared the two, but was clever enough to know that these comparisons would be made.

"I don't have a complex about the fact there are thousands of people who think about me because of that part because I know there are some out there who don't think that way. It's nice to be recognised for something. Even if it's only one thing, it's better than nothing."

A Very Long Engagement has proved controversial, both inside and outside France, partly because the subject of World War One was taboo for a long time, Jeunet feels. He's long been interested in that conflict. As a teenager he read everything he could about the subject. "I wasted a lot of holidays because it gave me nightmares. Even today it's very difficult to read some of that stuff," he says.

He has no idea why he was drawn to that war, making the same joke that he may have died during another life in World War One. "Maybe it's not a joke, who knows?" he adds. "I knew something, when I went in a trench for the first time and climbed up the ladder to see no man's land. It's a pretty strange feeling. But I have no explanation. It's just for World War One not World War Two."

Nowadays the war is "a kind of fashion" in France possibly, he believes, because there are so few survivors left. "It was in a magazine that 20 people were still alive from the war, and that was two years ago," he says. "It's like we don't want it to be too late. Everybody wants to read something about their great grandfathers. It's very close to our lives.

We had a very bad picture about World War One. It was stock footage and they walked too fast because they shot at 16 frames per second. It looked a little bit comic, like in a Chaplin movie. And the commemoration on November 11 was a little bit tacky.

"Now we understand it was a very difficult war and the life was so tough, and it was young people who died for just arms sellers. It was not a war against an ideology like World War Two. It was a war for nothing. We lost one and a half million people, it was huge."

For actor Gaspard Ulliel, who plays Mathilde's young soldier lover, the role was a voyage of discovery. Jeunet asked his actors to read a book on the war, a soldier's diary. "You can learn really interesting things about the daily life in the trenches, and the feelings that soldiers would get. So it really helped me to become conscious of what life was really like in those trenches," he says.

Setting foot in the trenches on the battlefield recreated for the film was shocking at first. "I had images of those trenches in black and white from the footage and the photos. Here we could see the real trenches in colour and it was really like you were in the trenches. We had the chance to work in a wonderful set, really realistic, and it helped the actors to feel more like soldiers."

Audiences will be surprised to see American actress Jodie Foster among the supporting cast. She's fluent in French and, while in Paris dubbing Panic Room, met Jeunet and said she'd like to work with him. Her name doesn't appear in the credits. "She is not on the poster because she knows Hollywood and could imagine the marketing saying, 'Jodie Foster in A Very Long Engagement'. She signed a contract to avoid that," says the director.

The film has also been involved in skirmishes about its nationality. Because of financial backing from Warner, it was declared not to be a French film despite being made in France with a French cast and crew. Jeunet attributes the dispute to commercial competition. "They tried to get rid of Warner out of France. We're a capitalist world and money interests are very important. They are ready to kill the French cinema over that and it's a shame. But, with luck, we are going to find a solution," he says.

* A Very Long Engagement (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 20/01/2005