This is
a really weird film. And it's dubbed, which I've come to accept in
TCS 8 drama serials, but which gets me really peeved when done anywhere else.
These are probably the only two things that you need to warned about before
going into this movie, because other than raving about how it's a marvellous
sequel from the directors of 1991's DELICATESSEN (Caro and Jeunet), and has
brilliant photography (Darius Khondji, who also did SEVEN) and imaginative set
construction (Jean Rabasse), most critics seem to convieniently leave these
facts out.
Petty grievances aside, however, I ended up liking THE CITY
OF LOST CHILDREN quite a bit. It's a dark fantasy, filled with lots of
twisted-metal and wire contraptions, malevolent, freakish sects, and intense,
surreal emotions. The set is a nightmarish construction that visually borrows
from the wickedly abnormal visions of THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN and
12 MONKEYS (Terry Gilliam) and fuses them with the old-world fantasy telling
of WILLOW and DUNE.
Living in a rig in the middle of a mist-shrouded
sea is a dysfunctional makeshift family of abnormal creations--a midget mother
figure (Mireille Mosse), a sibling collection of six identical, whining
clones, and "Uncle Irvin," a brain preserved in a glass tank with a lens for
sight and a gramophone for hearing. At the
centre of the family is the scienti st Krank (Daniel Emilfork), whose
inability to dream is making him age immaturely. He therefore employs a group
of blind fanatics, known as the Cyclops, to kidnap young children from the
nearby harbour town. When captured, he straps them in sleeping cocoon-like
structures and hooks them up to terrififying mind machines in order to steal
their dreams from them. Dreams, in the movie, are associated with youth,
happiness and innocence, which is why Krank prefers young children uncorrupted
by life's hardships.
One of the boys taken by the Cyclops has an
infantile brother, One (Ron Perlman), who makes a living as the strong man in
a nearby circus. Enraged, One sets out to recover his "little brother," and on
the way runs into a band of pilfering street urchins who are taught to steal
and then sent on "missions" by an orphanage run by a pair of Siamese twins
collectively known as The Octupus (Genevieve Brunet and Odile Mallet). One
becomes friends with one of the orphans, a sharp, nine-year-old named Miette
(Judy Vittet), and they set off toward the rig to rescue his brother.
THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN is a beautiful film, not only for the vivid
"world" created by set designer Rabasse (that earned him a Cesar in 1995), but
also for its cranky collage of unnerving ideas and twisted landscapes,
peppered with insane, genetic scientists, mechanic eyes that enhance
perception, trained, espionage flees and ironically distorted perspectives. It
is also a very much a world of ideas. For example, youth is
represented by beauty, as seen in the many shots of innocent orphans with
glowing ruby cheeks looking wonderingly at their captors, and the converse is
seen in the genetically flawed and morally tainted baddies who roam the city
looking to exploit the orphans for some reason or other.
But this
clear-cut good-bad contrast is probably the only thing that is articulated
properly in the film's coagulated storyline, which only gains momentum
somewhere in the middle. The British-accented voices also tend to exarcebate
things by giving the dialogue a slightly absurd feel. Besides making it
difficult to shake the feeling that I was watching the cast of Oliver! trapped
in a set from BRAZIL (again from Terry Gilliam), there was the nagging feeling
that Caro and Jeunet had dredged up the entire cast of monks from THE NAME OF
THE ROSE and re-cast them as the sect of one-eyed zealots in this film (see
picture of bald man with complicated monacle above and tell me he's not the
librarian who fancied Christian Slater in THE NAME OF THE ROSE).
Still, I think that THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN is worth $7 or $8, and
you should probably watch it in the theatres anyway, because it wouldn't have
the same effect on a TV screen. It runs a tight 108 minutes, has no nudity in
it, and is vastly entertaining if you're into films that don't use explosions
and bomb threats as their main story-telling device (although there are also
bombs in this film).
From inkpot.com
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