A Very Long Engagement is taken from Sebastien Japrisot's novel, published in 1991, about a young girl Mathilde waiting and hoping that her beau will return from the First World War. In the novel she is in a wheelchair, but director Jean-Pierre Jeunet felt it would be too restricting and so made her a polio victim, who walks with an impediment, and the wheelchair is used only when Mathilde is tired.

The film flips constantly between the two worlds, showing graphic scenes of trench warfare, as brutal and realistic as those realised in Saving Private Ryan, and introducing a set of deserters, who are ordered over the top into no man's land, which includes Mathilde's fiancé Manech (Gaspard Ullie). We get to meet the families of the others as well, largely through Jeunet's jerky quick fire editing technique.

Many will see traces of Amelie in Mathilde - she has the same fiery spirit - but largely the film is a wide-focus romantic epic and a fine piece of storytelling that unravels its secrets as we head towards a climax, wondering if Mathilde's man has made it out alive.

It is too long and Jeunet overdoes one or two jokes, which are funny the first time, but irritating the fifth. It has its saving graces, such as a lovely cameo from Jodie Foster, who seems almost unrecognisable, speaking French like it's her mother tongue.

This IS a very long engagement and one where you wish the camera would stop jumping so dizzily from scene to scene. But, in places, it remains bravura filmmaking, innovative and memorable. Also, it has a charm of its own and the war scenes are positively first rate.