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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE ILLUSIONIST Sylvain Chomet presents a gift some seven years after his initial promise with the wonderful and funny The Triplets of Belleville. That film had charm and really strange and surreal visions up the wazoo, with bicycle riders with small legs and torsos but huge legs. Chomet’s style, which extends somewhat to this film, bends reality just a little bit farther, with exaggerated characters in a medium that begs for inspired inventions in pencil and ink. Chomet, obviously a very big fan of the French director Jacques Tati (he features a clip of Tati’s Jour de fête), was given an un-produced screenplay that Tati wrote. (He said it would have been “too personal” for him to make it, and it doesn’t feature his patented Monsieur Hulot character). The spirit of Tati’s comic inventions and imagination is present, infused with the light but firm touch of Chomet. It’s a match that really works, more often than not. The story is much more straightforward than Belleville, which was more like a dream. This has the element of a fairy tale, but just a hint. A magician, just called the Illusionist, goes from town to town, making what little money he can from menial gigs, and one night in a Scottish pub he meets a young girl (she does have a name, Alice). The Illusionist notices she doesn’t have a proper pair of shoes and buys a nice red pair for her. She’s enamored of him, for that and for his cheerfully old-fashioned tricks (he even has the ol’ rabbit in the hat gag). And when he leaves, she tags along. Like Belleville, Chomet is not a fan of lots of things, like dialog, which is incidental. To be fair, this is also in the spirit of and was probably influenced by the original Tati script. Chomet is also a visual storyteller, as was his inspiration. But every so often, his tale is a little strange and not quite clear, like why Alice just follows along without much of a fuss from the Illusionist. But there she is with this old-timer magician in a 1950’s English town. He’s just trying to get by gig by gig, living in a small apartment. The money he makes he generously gives to Alice. She in turn becomes enamored with things: she looks at a shop window and sees a dress she desires, though it’s in all likelihood out of her price range. But eventually she does get it, and there’s a nice moment where she’s wearing the dress and comes across another girl who’s dressed like she used to, but in more raggedy clothing. It’s not too emphasized, just enough to make the class-status thing stick. It’s not really her story, though, but the Illusionist’s, who just wants to entertain people with only a set number of tricks up his sleeve. Night after night he plays to slim crowds, and he isn’t very good at much else. One of the big gags of the movie is when he’s accidentally mistaken, in a Tati-esque way, for an auto mechanic and is put on the spot to fix a car. He ultimately falls asleep in it overnight and is chided for getting in such a spot in the first place. There are other little moments like that, comic whimsy tinged with dark moments. One scene that had me howling is when Alice cooks rabbit soup for dinner, and the Illusionist eats it up… until he wonders where his little bunny went. Chomet’s traditional two-dimensional, hand-drawn animation is earthy and fun, reminiscent of something Don Bluth might have made in the 1980’s if he had an all-human cast. Chomet’s skills as a musical composer also shouldn’t be understated as there are many lovely compositions, especially for a bittersweet ending I dare not mention here.The
only faults I might lay on the movie, though nothing too serious, is
that so little is spoken that a scene that should require a little
talking, just a bit, is not there, and when it is it’s in French (no
subtitles). Parts of the story (Alice’s ego tripping) are also not quite
as satisfying when compared to something like Belleville, which
filled the mundane world with fantastical things. The fantastical figure
here is the magician of the old school, a man trying to get by with modernity—a
common theme for Tati.
When the film’s focused on that, it does just fine. The Illusionist
warms the heart like a cup of hot chocolate on a snowy night.
Jack Gattanella
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