The Illusionist is the latest animation from Sylvain Chomet, the man who directed The Triplets of Belleville. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival last week.
Some notes:
1. It is based on a screenplay that Jacques Tati wrote 54 years ago. The screenplay is believed to have been written as a message to the daughter that Tati abandoned, though Chomet’s film (somewhat controversially) doesn’t focus upon this aspect of the text.
2. The story follows an ageing magician who struggles to maintain an audience against the competition of the burgeoning rock and roll scene in Paris and London in the 1950s. He travels to a remote isle of Scotland and makes an impression upon Alice, who decides to follow him into a new life. Alice believes that Tatischeff is a genuine magician, and the old man goes to great lengths to preserve that fantasy.
3. At the screening, Chomet rejected the suggestion that the film was in any way nostalgic. But since the vision of Scotland in the late 1950s is rendered so lovingly in old school pencil and watercolour, and considering that every thing of beauty in the film – from magic tricks to innocence – is slated for destruction, I am not completely sure I can take the director’s word for it.
4. Chomet isn’t interested in letting his characters tell their own stories. The film is essentially without dialogue, and one of his primary characters is (distractingly) simple. Instead the director invests energy in the detail of the world they inhabit, and allows that world to define their roles. For example, Chomet shows the destiny of the gentle protagonist – the illusionist – by sending a ragged cast of ventriloquists, clowns and other performers sliding into desperation, and out of view, as the film progresses. The film’s consolations are found in its aesthetics rather than in character growth or triumph: magicians may not truly exist, but there is magic in the shadows on the walls, in the play of light on a lonely mountainside, in the gestures, postures and physical comedy of all people.
