The Anti-Sublime

World War I convinced the Enlightenment thinkers who believed they lived in the best of all possible worlds that, in fact, the world was not all crêpes and crème brûlée. In the war, most of Europe had experienced the horrors that people could inflict upon each other first-hand. One result of this was that people became fascinated with the sublime.

A Very Long Engagement, a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, explores the themes of that period in multiple layers. The film follows the story of a young French woman, Mathilde, whose fiancé, Manech, is sent off to fight in World War I. She is told he died in the trenches, basically sentenced to death because he self-mutilated. However, there are strings of uncertainty in the story, so she investigates to find the truth for herself.

Mathilde solemnly plays her tuba while she waits
for Manech to return.

The Individual

In searching for the truth of her fiancé's death, Mathilde explores the lives of other men who had suffered his same sentence alongside him. She finds the unique truths behind their times in the trenches, as well as the truths of the people they left behind in France. These stories give a very personal perspective on a very large war.

The Sublime

The tragic romance of Mathilde and Manech is the classic type people have loved for centuries. It is terrible, but in a melancholy, heart-aching way that is pleasing to experience at a distance. This film entertains that form of the sublime while pushing against a greater one: war. Machine guns obliterate anyone who goes above the trenches into no-man's land, bombs explode and splatter soldiers' viscera onto their friends' horrified faces, men shoot their fingers off with shotguns in efforts to escape the rot-and-lice-ridden hell of the trenches. This film does not glorify the nobility of dying at war; it depicts death in gory, gut-wrenching detail. I, at least, went away from the film solemn and struck with the horrors of war, not inspired to pick up a rifle.

I'll admit the idea of going to battle has at times sounded  to me. It was more in the way of fantasy novels in which people fight on horseback with swords and crossbows. Regardless, with its individual approach and challenge to the sublime elements of war, A Very Long Engagement effectively horrified me against the notion that battle is in any way romantic.

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