The City of Lost Children (1995, R)

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.