Judith Vittet’s natural delivery gives The City of Lost Children someone to care about amid its crowded fantasy. Her screen career was brief, but Miette’s partnership with Ron Perlman’s strongman is reason enough to seek her out.
Fi1m perspective
An orphan thief and a strongman are easier to grasp than most of what surrounds them in The City of Lost Children (1995). Judith Vittet plays Miette opposite Ron Perlman’s One, and the contrast gives Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro something clear to work with. They can stop insisting that everything is strange for a moment. Vittet is good enough to make us wish they would do so more often.
Her delivery is natural, her sense of the film’s tone assured. Miette’s resourcefulness has to be convincing if this partnership is to matter, and Vittet makes it so without overselling the child’s competence. We were moved by their companionship because each gives the other someone to depend on amid threatening company. Both actors let that dependence count, rather than requiring us to understand every complication before we can care. In a film so busy with invention, their scenes offer a welcome chance to attend to the people.
The temptation with so short a filmography is to talk about promise, which gives too little credit to the performance itself. Vittet appeared in four features between 1994 and 1997, beginning with Marion Vernoux’s Personne ne m’aime (1994). Claude Sautet’s Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud (1995) gave her a supporting role, while K (1997) was her final acting credit. Miette was the principal role, and she made it count. There is no need to imagine a lost later career to value what she did here.
That does not make The City of Lost Children an unqualified success. Jeunet and Caro sometimes crowd the storytelling enough to leave their actors competing for attention. There are stretches where we would rather have stayed with Miette and One. See it for the pair of them, provided a little narrative confusion does not spoil an evening.
Biography
Judith Vittet is a French actress and textile artist. Born on 1 December 1984 in Paris, she began acting as a child after being noticed by a casting director.
Her early roles include Lili in Personne ne m'aime (1994), Bénédicte in Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995) and the title character Miette in The City of Lost Children (1995). She also appeared in K (1997). After completing her baccalauréat ES in 2002 she studied film and later worked as a costume designer on television series until 2014, before turning to textile design and installations.
