I was skeptical about watching A Very Long Engagement as not only is it a French film which means subtitles which are hard to read on our old telly, BUT it is both a war movie and a romance, neither of which genre I particularly like. This film, however, is positively remarkable.

It is sort of the slightly less upbeat cousin to Amelie and features Audrey Tatou in the lead role as Matilde. She is an orphan, raised by her aunt and uncle in rural France who suffers from a bad leg resulting from Polio as a child. Her fiance, Manech, was supposedly killed/executed in No Man's Land near the Bingo Crepescule trench in World War I. It is now 1920 and she is determined to find out what really happened to him, his 4 companions and to find him, hopefully alive, but if not then a body or a grave. She believes his is still living despite mounds of evidence to the contrary.

This film veers back and forth between brutal scenes from the trench, Matilde's efforts to track her lost love and the backstory to how they met. While the war scenes are horrifying and you can feel Matilde's increasing desperation as hope fades that she will find Manech alive it's also embued with some of the same whimsy as Amelie and with a great deal of warmth. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter the film had me smiling by the mid-point and I didn't stop for the rest of the evening.

It's one of those magical films like Shawshank Redemption that will restore your faith in romance and in love and it's one that the boys will find amazing too.