From a
narrative standpoint, I’d say this is the most uneven of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
French films. It isn’t as
tightly-written, and some of the tangents are just plain odd. However, I still love it. It’s also probably the most ambitious and
wildly-unique story of any of his movies, and while I’ve seen other films that
fall under the same loose umbrella of dark surrealist urban fantasy, I’ve never
seen anything quite like this. And to
me, that’s pretty much always the real stamp of a Jeunet film.
The nights
are unsafe. Children are being snatched
by the Cyclops, a cult of blind men who “see” electronically with the aid of
high-tech eye- and earpieces. What no
one knows, however, is that the children are given to Krank, a
genetically-engineered mad scientist unable to dream. He tries to harvest their dreams to put in
his own head, but with Krank as their captive, the children have nothing but
nightmares. A childlike strongman street
performer named One goes after the Cyclops when they kidnap his adopted little
brother, and with the help of Miette, a clever young guttersnipe, his mission
takes him to the very heart of Krank’s lair.
There’s a
lot going on here. At times, it feels like, “Circus performers
and brains in a jar and clones, oh my!”, a hodgepodge of elements and motifs
stitched together Frankenstein-style.
The result is bizarre and a little off-putting, but wonderful, too. It tries to reach for more than any other
Jeunet film, and while it sometimes falls short, it’s an undoubtedly wild ride
that has some really neat things to offer.
Visually,
of course it’s amazing. From the
battered brasswork look of Krank’s lab to the comic-horrible sight of One and
Miette bound and gangplanked in preparation for their “swim with the fishes,”
there’s a wondrous, very intentional detail to the design and composition of
every shot. The movie is also absolutely
crazy about intricate chains of events where one circumstances follows another
like dominoes. These chains are always
impressive to watch, with my personal favorite being the kids’ complicated plan
to break into a particular building.
At the
heart of the story is One and Miette, and Ron Perlman and Judith Vittet deliver
superbly in their roles. My guess is
that Perlman’s French is far from fluent, but that works for One, who speaks in
fragmentary sentences and struggles with abstract concepts. He plays wonderfully against Vittet, whose
Miette is tough, smart, and cynical. In the
face of One’s single-minded determination to recover his little brother, the
girl finds her hard shell beginning to crack.
In addition to Dominique Pinon, who does a great job as all the clones
(he’s no Tatiana Maslany, but he’s still a blast,) other Jeunet mainstays
featured here include Ticky Holgado, Rufus, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, and Dominique
Bettenfeld.
Warnings
Violence,
disturbing images, brief sexual content, and drinking.
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