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No human calamity can withstand Audrey Tautou’s impish smile. The carnage of World War I fades as nothing before its light. In the opening scenes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles, five French soldiers maim themselves (one by accident, for such is the irony of war) to escape the horrors of the front. The nefarious brass reacts by abandoning them to their death in no man’s land. But these corrupt masters of war did not figure on the perseverance of Tautou’s Mathilde, the fiancée of one of the five, who years later is determined to learn her beloved’s fate. Or on the overripe whimsy of Jeunet, whose technique of the pixilated, precious flashback reached its limits with Amélie. True, Jeunet does darken the picture with Tina (Marion Cotillard), the beloved of another of the condemned soldiers, whose notion of restitution is less rosy and more bloodthirsty. But a glance at Stanley Kubrick’s similarly themed Paths of Glory is enough to expose Dimanche in all its phoniness and maudlin manipulation. In French with English subtitles. (133 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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