by Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1995.
Starring: Geneviève Brunet, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Daniel Emilfork, Odile Mallet, Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Judith Vittet.
Rating: 8/10, 9/10.
OK, so I’ve been stalling on this one, but I promised myself I’d write the review before I went to bed tonight. What to write, though, what to write?
City of Lost Children genuinely defies description. It’s so beautiful and ugly to look at, it made me so happy and so depressed. Blah. This is precisely my kind of movie, the kind I’d want to make if I did make movies, and if you don’t like that kind of thing, well, then, it’s not your kind of thing.
I like visuals. If the visuals are good, I don’t care that much about anything else. Hence my love of movies like Barbarella, Dark City, and Moulin Rouge, which perhaps aren’t the best of films technically, but visually are damned amazing. And note that by "good visuals," I very definitely DO NOT mean high tech spiffy uber-realistic special effects. Like, the effects in Lord Of The Rings, say, were technical marvels, and pretty fun to look at, but not much more than that. The visuals in City Of Lost Children are not all that advanced, but they burrow under that protective layer of shallowness that I have (I’ve talked about it before, I think) and manage to get into my soul, where they sort of muck around and change things to their liking.
I’m a sucker for completely impossible futures. Visions of versions of the future that are nothing at all like anything our own future has any chance of being. (I also like structuring sentences like that last one.) In City, this vision is of a completely mechanical future. All the devices are driven by gears and clockwork, not electricity and digital shiznit. And it’s great. I also enjoyed the moody darkness of the sets—not just absence of light darkness like so many failed attempts get, but realy moody darkness. And the costumes—by the wonderful designer Jean-Paul Gautier—are lovely, with all the stripes and everything, they somehow seem to fit in just right with the rest of the setting. Oh, and the music? By my very own hero, Angelo Badalamenti, of David Lynch film score fame.
Jeunet, the co-director, more recently directed Amélie, the most fabulous movie that ever happened to me. It seems odd that he made both (though they are both primarily visual experiences), since Amélie is so light and fun, and City is so heavy and dark. But there are some touches here that would be right up Amélie’s alley—her dark alley, that is: the scene where we get a complete rundown of all the interconnected occurences that conspire to save our heroes is one of them; the bit where we trace the path of the released dream is another.
No, I haven’t mentioned the plot at all. Yes, I was very involved in it, and I thought it was fascinating, but honestly, it’s no longer that important to me now that I’m done watching it. What I remember are the images.
ps. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a decent picture of any of those images. You’re just going to have to trust me, or find out by watching the damn movie.
read roger ebert's review, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy, as if he were talking directly to me