On Sunday, Viv and I went to a Cinema Seattle screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s upcoming film, A Very Long Engagement, which stars Audrey Tatou as a young woman whose fiancé fails to return from the trenches of the First World War, and sets about finding him. I saw the film for review, so I’ll skip the windbaggery here until the review runs. I can tease you, though: I liked it.

I experimentally used a Moleskine to take notes in the dark on the film; this is clearly not a cost-effective strategy, as in the dark one tends to write larger and less legibly. Next time it’s back to steno pads.

Jeunet was present at the screening and I was able to ask him a couple of decent questions.

I do have one gripe about the film which is utter airplane nerd trivia and therefore won’t rate in the review. It’s also a bit of a spoiler, so I won’t go into it in detail here yet. In essence, an airplane that appears in the film is explicitly identified as one of a series of well-known German models. The plane used in the film proper is clearly not the distinctive model it’s identified as. In fact, it appears to be a plane from the period between the wars. Only aeronerds will care, but it bugged the hell out of me.

I didn’t take the time to address this issue with the director, and I regret it.

One thought on “Jeunet

  1. I have the same problem with aircraft blunders. Invariably in movies they get some aspect wrong – the interior doesn’t match the exterior, the plane couldn’t possibly make the distance, the cockpit’s wrong for the model…argh!

    I suppose that – in certain cases – it’s not possible to get certain aircraft (e.g. Soviet aircraft before 1989) but, especially with commercial aircraft, it simply seems that ignorance is rife.

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