A Very Long Engagement (French: Un long dimanche de fian ailles) is a 2004 French romantic war film, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou. It is a fictional tale about a young woman`s desperate search for her fianc who might have been killed on a World War I battlefield (the Somme). It was based on a novel of the same name, written by Sebastien Japrisot, first published in 1991.

Five soldiers are convicted of self-mutilation in order to escape military service during World War I. They are condemned to face near certain death in the no man`s land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but Mathilde, the fianc e 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 English-language version, this is changed to `Manech Marries 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 man`s 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 fianc e in Paris and the French countryside mostly Brittany of the 1920s, and in flashback to the battlefield. In fact, however, the couple are from Cap-Breton, in the Landes department of southwest France.This is made clear in the novel.

This movie was directed by the same director who directed Amelie. A very beautiful story presented with beautiful cinamatography and good acting by Audrey Tattoo and Marion Cotillard. This is a movie one should not miss.