Sylvain Chomet animates a screenplay Jacques Tati never got to film, and the result is a near-silent, hand-drawn and unrelievedly sad account of a magician outlived by his trade. It is lovely to look at and a little too pleased with its own melancholy.
Sylvain Chomet’s second feature is drawn, in both senses, from a screenplay Jacques Tati wrote and never filmed. Its hero, Tatischeff (voiced, in the few words he gets, by Jean-Claude Donda), is a stage magician working the last of the music halls in 1959, and he is Tati to the life: the long legs, the raincoat, the stiff polite bow to an audience that has already left. The film follows him from France to Edinburgh, and at every stop the bookings are smaller and the guitars louder. It runs 80 minutes, has almost no dialogue, and is one of the saddest films we have seen carry a PG certificate. We recommend it, and we think it is about twenty minutes of melancholy longer than its story needs.
There is no cinematographer to credit on an animated film, so credit the painters. Edinburgh is done in watercolour: wet stone, gulls, a castle on its rock, a sky that goes from gold to slate in the time it takes a tram to cross the frame. Chomet fills the edges of the picture with people who have nothing to do with the plot and does not let them stand still. A drunk in a pub, a mechanic, a row of shop girls in a department store: each is drawn as a particular body with a particular walk.
Chomet also edits the film and writes the score, a piano waltz that keeps coming back a little slower each time. He knows when to hold a shot. Tatischeff’s act is shown in full, more than once, so that we learn the tricks and then watch an audience fail to care about them. The sound does the work the dialogue would normally do: rain on windows, heels on tenement stairs, a rabbit’s teeth meeting a finger. When people do speak it is in French, or in a Scots so thick it might as well be another language, and none of it is subtitled. That is the right decision; you understand everything anyway.
It is funnier than its reputation. The rabbit, which bites everyone and escapes at every opportunity, is the best animal in a cartoon for years. We laughed a good deal in the first half, and we noticed, about an hour in, that we had stopped, and that Chomet had planned it that way.
The trouble is Alice (Eilidh Rankin). She is the girl who believes the tricks are real and follows him to the city, and she wants things: red shoes, a coat, a pair of heels. Tatischeff finds ways to pay for them. That is all she is. Rankin has next to nothing to say, and Chomet draws Alice looking into shop windows so often that the middle of the film becomes a list. Tati’s own films kept their sadness moving with a crowd of jokes; Chomet pushes the jokes to the margins and lets the picture sit still and look at the rain. Most critics have found that stillness the point. We found it a limit, and by the last reel we were waiting for it to end, which is not what sadness should do to you.
Set beside Belleville Rendez-vous, this is the smaller, kinder film: no grotesques, no set-piece chases. It is also the more careful one. The ending takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it is quiet, that it leaves one question open, and that it has the decency not to answer it in a speech.
Watch it on a wet evening, with the sound up and the phone in another room. It asks for eighty minutes of attention and repays most of them.
