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Trivia / A Very Long Engagement

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  • All-Star Cast: The movie packs quite an amount of famous French actors, with Audrey Tautou, Marion Cotillard, Dominique Pinon, Clovis Cornillac, Chantal Neuwirth, Albert Dupontel, Denis Lavant, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, André Dussollier, Ticky Holgado, Julie Depardieu, Tchéky Karyo, Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Philippe Duquesne. There's also the Belgian Bouli Lanners, and American Jodie Foster.
  • Banned in China: The film caused some serious outrage among Corsican people, as they felt it depicts them like chauvinistic, honor-obsessed gangsters or jerkasses, not helped by the fact that the character from there, Ange Bassignano, himself a pretty unsavory man, shouts "I'm not French, I'm Corsican!" on the No Man's Land while waving a White Flag in the hope of having his life spared by the Germans, and his very gung-ho nationalistic French officer shoots him in the head after hearing this. Thousands of Corsicans died during World War I, and the movie was deemed "insulting" to their memory because of said scene. The movie was pulled off all theaters in Corsica to avoid more controversy.
  • Completely Different Title: The film is called Mathilde - Eine große Liebe ("Mathilde - A Great Love") in Germany.
  • Fake Nationality:
    • Jodie Foster as (Polish-born) Frenchwoman Élodie Gordes. Foster is one of the most fluent French-speaking actresses of all the American movie industry, and as such she didn't need to be dubbed.
    • One of the French officers is played by Bouli Lanners, a Belgian actor who could not fully disguise his Walloon accent.
  • Production Posse: The film was made by the same production team as Amélie, with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, lead actress Audrey Tautou and some usual "Jeunet films faces" like Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen) or the late Ticky Holgado.
  • Star-Making Role:
    • The film, along with André Téchiné's Les Égarés, put Gaspard Ulliel on the map.
    • This film earned Marion Cotillard a César award for Best Supporting Actress and cemented her as a star in Francophone countries. La Vie en Rose meanwhile was her international breakthrough.

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