Attila
Marcel
***
Dir: Sylvain Chomet. With: Guillaume Gouix, Anne
Le Ny, Bernadette Lafont. 106 mins. Cert: 12A
France’s Sylvain
Chomet has been responsible for two of this century’s outstanding animated
films in 2003’s Belleville Rendezvous
and 2010’s The Illusionist. His first
live-action feature expands the Tati-like flourishes of that last project: the
quest of mute, piano-playing manchild Paul (Guillaume Gouix) to uncover the truth
about his parents’ mysterious death is very nearly buried amid a tangle of
sight gags as overgrown as one character’s interior greenhouse. Fortunately,
most of these – the blind man tuning a balustrade with his cane, the oddly
proportioned dogs – are just funny enough to sustain it, and Chomet dodges the
sickly, undernourished whimsy Jean-Pierre Jeunet has been reduced to by
ensuring his traumatised protagonist’s every forward step passes over a deep
wellspring of emotion: somewhere in here, there’s an affecting treatise on what
we take from our fathers, and give back to our children. Not as essential as
the animations, but sweet and very likable.
Attila Marcel is now playing in selected cinemas.
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