Not every FIlmmaker winds up making the most commercially successful, publicly adored French film of all time, but to those who do, one question looms above all others: How do you follow it up? For director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose 2001 movie Amélie was the French equivalent of Titanic, the challenge of repeating his global sensation was clearly at the forefront of his consciousness. You can assume this for many reasons--some cynical, some just plain sensible--but the proof is on the screen: A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet's new picture, is not so much a sequel or even a prequel to Amélie, but, notwithstanding a few modifications, a veritable remake. Let's all just take a moment to congratulate Monsieur Jeunet on a very wise decision.

The beloved star (Audrey Tautou) is the same. The crew is the same. The look--cinematic honey dripping from the corner of every frame--is the same. The investigatory plot structure is basically the same. The language is the same. And most importantly, despite all contextual demands to the contrary, the life-and-love-affirming spirit that made Amélie so undeniably pleasing (haters can suck it!), like the richest chocolate truffle you ever tasted, is also the same. A Very Long Engagement takes place during WWI, and is full of carnage, mustard gas, severed limbs, and murderous revenge. It's also full of swooning romance, lifelong passions, and omnivorous rapture for the possibilities of love against all hope.

In this way, Engagement is just a melodrama, however epic in scale. And unlike its predecessor, which was also a big fat melodrama, the film is not impossible not to fall for. The ending, for one, is an anti-climax. At times the whimsy feels somewhat put on, and at others, the resemblances to Amélie are so profound that you wonder if you might not be seeing outtakes from the original film. However, these moments are few and these criticisms are hair-splitting. Amélie was successful not simply because it was a delightful fairy tale, but because it was an earnest, fully compelling argument for mankind's inherent goodness. If that's Jeunet's new paradigm--and talk about a departure; this from the man who codirected such nihilistic escapades as Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, and Alien: Resurrection--then the challenge he set before himself is much bigger than following up a big hit. He's trying to make a movie that takes place in one of the darkest corners in human history whose entire raison d'être is to bask in the light of romantic love. Surely, this is the work of a great artist.

The very long engagement promised by the title is the relationship between Mathilde (Tautou) and Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), who met as children in an enchanted French coastal village and fell in movie love, spending every spare moment together, and developing the kind of bond that only exists in the imagination of filmmakers and die-hard romanticists. Mathilde has a lame leg, so Manech carries her up the ladder to the top of the lighthouse, where they carve their initials and gaze out at the heaving sea together, and so forth. When Manech is drafted into the service and shipped off to fight in the Great War, Mathilde promises to wait for him, and more importantly, to know if anything befalls him. Of course, the word eventually comes that Manech was killed while awaiting court martial for self-mutilation--I won't explain this device, except to say that it calls on some of Jeunet's deepest visual inventiveness and darkest humor--and Mathilde refuses to believe it. Despite her physical handicap, she sets out into the cruel world like a silent movie waif to reconstruct the mystery of her lover's fate--with the help of detectives, fellow war widows, and good old-fashioned pluck--and, impossibly, to resurrect Manech through the simple, blinding power of hope.

I'm not saying it doesn't sound corny. I'm not saying it isn't corny. What I'm saying is that it's a fantastic movie, and unless you're the stated enemy of life and all that makes it worth living, you'll probably fall for it. This is down to two elements: The first is Jeunet's incredible visual flair. As in all his prior works, the canvas for the film is a hybrid of surrealism, magical realism, and purest fantasy. The sun is an eruption of amber, the moon a dish of phosphorescent cream, and everything in between them, from the mud of the trenches to the cobblestone streets of 1920s Paris, is imbued with the loving gaze of a master stylist for whom everything should always look slightly better than it really is. This attention to detail (even the fat kitty looks like a painting) lends a sense of occasion to even throwaway moments, while conferring a spiritual heft on the melodrama that both belies and supports the whimsical nature of the narrative. The second element, obviously, is Audrey Tautou, who proves once again that she is the reason God invented sight. As in Amélie (though curiously not in any of the films she's appeared in since), Tautou's wide-open face and massive chocolate eyes are the heart, soul, and entire point of the film, elevating it from an elaborate fable into another life-affirming adventure.

When I interviewed Jeunet in Seattle in 2001, he lashed out at the criticisms against his highly stylized oeuvre. "They think if you have style, if the film is lit well, or is poetic, then you are not making something true," he complained. "The reverse is true. The style is important. I love to play with everything. I can't avoid it. You need the style to get to the emotion. It's actually more realistic, dans un certain sense." In the case of A Very Long Engagement, which makes even the no man's land of the Western Front look like an appealing place to visit, it may not be more realistic, but it's a lot more beautiful.