Animated film a charming, tender throwback

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This article was published 18/03/2011 (5686 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Any movie deserves to be judged on its own merits. But the back story behind The Illusionist offers up such a surprising perspective, it merits consideration.

Of the movie itself, it’s a gorgeous animated work from the masterful Sylvain Chomet, who last made the sublime feature The Triplets of Belleville.

Here, Chomet essentially collaborates with the legendary French screen comic Jacques Tati, who has been dead for nearly 30 years.

Tati has been celebrated for his mastery of the medium in his classic comedies such as Play Time, films that revived the pleasures of silent comedy in an era of colour and sound.

The Illusionist is a hitherto unproduced Tati screenplay about a magician struggling in an era when rock ‘n’ roll is hammering the last coffin nail into the traditional European music hall.

Resigned to playing nearly empty theatres, Monsieur Tatischeff (Tati’s original family name) barely scrapes by doing the kind of old-fashioned magic act that involves pulling a rabbit out of a hat. (It is a Tati-esque detail that the rabbit is decidedly unhappy about its lot in life. It bites.)

With his options diminishing, Tatischeff takes a gig in a pub on a remote Scottish island where he is still appreciated. (Even there, we can surmise his days are numbered with the ominous appearance of a jukebox on the pub premises.) It is here he meets a naive Scottish girl who believes Tatischeff’s sleight-of-hand really is magic. She is especially impressed when he charitably conjures a new pair of shoes for her (surreptitiously purchased earlier). Hence, when the engagement has run its course, he journeys back to London and she follows, moving in with him into the shabby hotel populated by the kind of entertainers — acrobats, ventriloquists, clowns — whose careers are likewise in shared twilight.

The reason for Tatischeff’s charitable adoption of the girl is never spelled out, but we surmise it has to do with the photo he keeps by his mirror of a figure now absent from his life.

The occasion allows Chomet the opportunity to resurrect Tati physically, a tall, ponderous figure possessed of a unique, self-contradictory quality one could only describe as clumsy grace.

Tati would likely approve of Chomet’s glorious mise-en-scène. Every frame of film could be a painting, and within that frame, a multitude of comic details. (After a steady diet of computer-generated animation, Chomet’s work is a visual treat akin to leafing through a photo album and coming upon an impressionist masterpiece.)

The back story: Tati essentially abandoned his first daughter, born in 1942, the result of an affair with a dancer. A controversy currently rages as to whether this screenplay is intended as a conciliation with his legitimate daughter (of whom it is said Tati felt he neglected), or a poignant acknowledgement of the daughter he left behind so many years earlier.

We may never know the truth, but the issue only enhances one’s appreciation of Chomet’s film. On top of its lavish animation and its gentle comedy, it has mystery, too.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca