The Illusionist

Nominated for Best Animated Feature at this year's Oscars, The Illusionist is a film by Sylvain Chomet, but is based on an unproduced screenplay by the legendary French director Jacquest Tati. It is a luscious work, excelling on several levels: an homage to Tati, a droll comedy, and a melancholy ode to lost family.

Set in 1959, Chomain's film, which is almost entirely free of dialogue, depicts a stage magician named Tatischeff (Tati's real name). He is a competent performer, but hardly an exciting one, working mostly with a top hat and a recalcitrant rabbit. As the film begins, Tatischeff is let go from a music hall in Paris, and he travels to London.

He finds a few gigs, including following a rock band called Billy and the Britoons, and is hired by a kilt-wearing Scotsman. He ends up playing a saloon on a remote Scottish island, where he enchants a young serving girl. He pays her a kindness, and she seems to think he really has magic powers. She follows him to Edinburgh, where he looks after her as a father might.

White Tatischeff struggles to find work--he takes a job performing in a department-store window, and a night job at an auto garage--the girl starts to blossom, wearing the nice clothing that he buys for her. She is kind to him and the others in their hotel, a motley bunch of performers that include a drunken ventriloquist and triplet acrobats, but the two begin drifting apart. When Tatischeff sees that she is keeping company with an attractive young man, he makes a fateful decision.

Tati wrote this script as something of an open letter to his estranged daughter, and once armed with that information The Illusionist takes on an even more poignant cast. Perhaps it was too personal for him to ever actual make, but Chomain has been very respectful in his adaptation. The animation is lovely--less frenetic that his previous film The Triplets of Belleville, but with the same kind of eye for detail and human oddity (the characters in this film display a wide variety of physical quirks).

Visually speaking, I enjoyed most the way Chomain captures a time now gone, the age when a certain kind of performer could travel the world, suitcase and rabbit cage in tow, searching for the next gig (in some ways the film made me think of Woody Allen's valentine to show business, Broadway Danny Rose).

The film also manages to balance humor and pathos. There are some wonderfully funny bits--the send-up of British rock bands, and a sequence in which Tatischeff worries that the girl has cooked his rabbit for dinner--and some moments of real heartbreak, such as when a clown is interrupted in a suicide attempt by the girl delivering soup (the clown made me laugh when, the sink in his room not operating, he washes his face by using his squirting flower).

The Illusionist isn't perfect. There are moments, even in the scant 90-minute running time, where the narrative hits dead spots. But for the most part I sat back in my seat and let this charming film wash over me.

My grade for The Illusionist: B+