"Magicians don't exist"

In keeping with my recent film choices of the French and animated variety, we watched a beautiful film that happened to be both French and animated. 

L'illusionniste (The Illusionist) is an 80 minute animation based off a screenplay written by Jacques Tati and directed by Sylvain Chomet, who also directed The Triplets of Belleville and the Tour Eiffel segment of Paris Je T'aime (which I also happened to have just watched) about amorous mime artists that can be seen here. Chomet has developed a completely unique style with almost a complete lack of language, save for a few common words and some incomprehensible chatter, and beautiful hand drawn animation of real world landscapes and caricatures that push the aesthetic towards humorous fantasy. The muted colours and the subtle humor transcend language and allow this film to be understood visually and emotionally by all ages.

The film centers around Tatischeff (Jacques Tati's real name), an aging vaudeville illusionist struggling to make ends meet in the music halls of Paris in the late 1950s. He travels to the grey and very wet London in hopes of revitalizing his career, only to discover how irrelevant his act is in a city overcome with the rock and roll sensation and Beatlesque band Billy Boy and the Britoons, a lament for a lost era of  entertainment. He at last finds an appreciative audience in Scotland and in one particular young girl named Alice who becomes enamoured with his illusions and accompanies him to Edinburgh. She wishes for new shoes and dresses and when they appear for her, she has no idea that he has to scrape together his pennies and work numerous demeaning jobs in order to conjure them up for her. His is a dying breed and we watch as other fellow variety artists struggle with alcoholism and suicide as they discover more and more that their talents are no longer needed and appreciated as they used to be. The world is changing with several Cold War allusions portrayed through newspaper headlines on the street.



He cultivates the illusion to transform Alice into a young woman who, though still naive, looks and dresses like a member of high society. It is through his own demise and sacrifices that she rises and makes something of herself and gets a chance at a life better than the poor one she had before. Just as she is opening her eyes to the world, he is losing his faith, his illusions of keeping magic alive fading from his eyes. It's these emotions and bonds of this film that resonate. Though it is often somber, the film is beautifully lightened by its unique and charming supporting characters and scene-stealing sketches of a drunken Tatischeff stumbling upstairs or fretting for his grumpy rabbit who he believes may have been cooked into Alice's stew, only to emerge from under the couch to gobble up a bag of sausages.

With Chomet's beautifully evocative recreations of Paris, London and Edinburgh from a bygone age and his amazing attention to detail he manages to create a sense of illusion and wonderment. I especially loved the scene where feathers from an open pillow case turn into an unlikely snowstorm, tricking young Alice into thinking winter has suddenly arrived and feeling the need to light a warm fire. Or even more remarkably when Tatischeff stumbles into a theater playing Mon Oncle (a Jacques Tati film) and for a few surreal seconds, the real and imagined Tati come face to face. These moments of beauty are what bring such life to this melancholy tale.