5/10
Of all the films I saw at the Berlin Film Festival, this was the one I was looking forward to most - and therefore was most disappointed by.
The reason? Because it is the new film by Sylvain Chomet who made Belleville Rendezvous aka Les Triplets de Belleville. I loved that film, and was dying to see this new project, especially as it is based on an unfilmed Jacques Tati script.
The period is the late 1950s. Tatischeff (Tati's real name) is a conjuror who has fallen on hard times. Audiences are deserting the music hall, and his act has more cobwebs than a deserted broom cupboard in an empty house. He travels to London from Paris for a show, but that doesn't go down too well either, so he heads off to a remote island off the Scottish coast where he is booked for an evening of magic at a pub. It is there that he meets a young girl (a rather naive teenager) who is convinced that he really can do magic, and therefore follows him back to Edinburgh.
What I liked about the film was the design. It is beautifully drawn, especially the recreation of Edinburgh in the 1950s. The animated Tati is also tres charmant, an accurate image of the great man. Apart from that, not a lot. The plot is slender to the point of anorexic, and what there is makes for unsatisfactory viewing. The central relationship between the middle aged/elderly man and the adolescent girl is both unconvincing and slightly creepy. This is not helped by the fact that the drawing of her face doesn't resemble any human I've ever seen; she simply doesn't look real. Added to the fact that she seems to have a brain the size of a small pea, and the absence of any dialogue (this being a Tati-ish film), there isn't a lot left to get excited about. The music is awful, and by the end of the 90 minutes, I was waiting for it to end (with a good deal of impatience) and wondering why Chomet had invested so much time and money into a project that simply never comes to life. Whimsy without purpose.
