Animated film tells conjurer's story

A still from The Illusionist.

THE ILLUSIONIST
(L'illusionniste)
Monday, April 9, 7pm
Davis Theatre, Whanganui Regional Museum
Sylvain Chomet • France/UK • 2010 • 80mins • PG violence • In English

This Monday's Whanganui Film Society offering comes from France and the UK: The Illusionist.

Review
"This movie by the French film-maker Sylvain Chomet is an act of homage and an act of cinematic love: a classically conceived, hand-drawn animation based on an unproduced script by Jacques Tati, written in 1956: a manuscript evidently guarded for more than 50 years by his family, and particularly his daughter Sophie, until Chomet begged for permission to adapt it, with a new British setting. The result is utterly distinctive and beguiling, with its own language and grammar of innocence: gentle, affectionate, whimsical, but deeply felt and with an arrowhead of emotional pain. I think it will be admired and loved as much as Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away was 10 years ago.

"The Illusionist is a semi-silent movie, with rudimentary, mumbled fragments of dialogue, about an old-fashioned variety-turn conjuror at the end of the 1950s, specialising in rabbits and hats, paper flowers and coins. He presents each creaky trick with a deadpan fastidious flourish and a raised forefinger, like a distracted sommelier in an empty restaurant. Lack of work forces him to leave France for England, from where he heads north and acquires a companion, a girl from rural Scotland, who shares tatty theatrical digs with him as a daughter-figure — or is it that he is her 'uncle'? — heartbreakingly dazzled by the dusty, faded showbiz glamour that everyone else finds so passe, or perhaps actually believing in the illusions themselves. It is in Edinburgh, where the movie winds up, that the illusionist becomes disillusioned, but brings off an authentic act of human magic.

"Simply being an animation, and an old-style animation, is a great effect. The Illusionist is like a seance that brings to life scenes from the 1950s with eerie directness, in a way that glitzy digital animation or live-action period location work could somehow never do. Something in the unassuming simplicity of the composition allows the viewer to engage directly with the world being conjured up. This is, after all, a film for which the 1950s is the present-day. The visions of the old King's Cross railway station in London, or the old boat-train, or Edinburgh with its lonely seaside-cry of seagulls, are all weirdly like a remembered dream of a fictional childhood. Everything is paradoxically, vividly present.

"Piercingly well-observed details are everywhere: the tiling around a hissing old gas fire, the test card playing on the televisions in the shop window, a woman's crucifix matching the cross on her Bible in the train compartment. Whole interior scenes will play solely to the sound of shoes and boots squeaking and creaking across floorboards. In case we thought the movie was too sugary, we see a gang of short-trousered boys booting an unconscious tramp. Yet when Chomet's animated 'camera' takes off for a swirling, overhead shot of a lovingly realised Edinburgh, the effect is dashing, breathtaking, even weirdly moving.

"Admittedly, one has to adjust to the gentle, undemanding pace of this movie, which does not force its insights and meanings but allows them to meander into view, a pace which suddenly jolts into a higher gear when Chomet and Tati show us how The Illusionist loses his faith in his vocation. There is something shocking in the way he deliberately, angrily sabotages a trick with short and long pencils, thus upsetting and bewildering a little boy. But the real magic, the magic he has created, is happening behind his back, and under our noses. The Illusionist is an intricate jewel."
— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian