It’s been said that any good war movie is an anti-war movie. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s war romance follows that axiom and blends it with a moving story of love, determination, and intrigue. If the first goal of film is to tell a story, this one does it beautifully. Spanning four years during and after World War I, it’s an epic as sweeping as the wind that whips across the wheat sheaves of a farmer, plucked from his field and conscripted into the army. Yet it remains a focused story of a young woman’s search for her missing fiancé. The tale returns again and again to the events of a cold January day in 1917 on a battlefield called Bingo Crepescule.

From the first shot of the rain soaked trenches, where one can almost feel the winter chill, to the final credits showing faded photos listing the players, the lush cinematography gives the drama a big boost. It transports the viewer to that specific time and place, like listening to a master storyteller. The wedding engagement of childhood sweethearts Mathilde and Menech (Audrey Tautou and Gaspard Ulliel) is interrupted by the war when Menech leaves their idyllic seaside village for the front. Convicted and sentenced to death with four other soldiers for self-mutilation to escape combat, their battlefield execution adds a layer of exacting cruelty to the absurdity of war.

Jeunet again exercises his knack at blending fanciful touches into his storytelling, as in his previous work (City of Lost Children, Amélie), this time emphasizing romantic resolve over his hard-edged style. The central event of the soldiers’ execution becomes increasingly mysterious after the war when Matilde refuses to believe her beloved is dead and seeks irrefutable proof. With the intensity that only cinematic love can muster, our hopes rise and fall with Mathilde’s, as unexpected fragments of information come to light. The explosive combat scenes, sometimes horrifically realistic, at other times surreal, are contrasted with well-paced shifts to the picturesque cottage Mathilde shares with her aunt and uncle, to Paris or to other locations where Mathilde and her private detective travel to unravel the mystery.

The plot thickens when hints surface that some of the condemned men survived and witnesses give conflicting accounts. Camera angles that dwarf the human figures in favor of a clock face, or favor the players over the huge base of the Eiffel Tower, add visual interest and serve to move the story. Echoes of other great love and wartime stories (Paths of Glory, The Third Man, Random Harvest) are abundant but not forced. Jeunet’s teasing theme of hands, so central to human activity, - inadequate hands - wounded, gloved, wooden and mechanical, suggest forces beyond our grasp of control.

Touched with just enough contemporary fantasy elements to bridge the gap between haunting war story and improbable fairy tale, this will likely be another popular and critical success for Jeunet. Audrey Tautou is restrained and focused, exhibiting a fuller range than the gamin of Amélie, and the rest of the cast is uniformly fine.