THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN
(1995)
A film review by Bilrius Finkelstein
Directed by: Marc Caro (artistic director) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Produced by: Canal+ Productions / Lumiere Pictures / Sony Pictures Classics
Cast: Ron Perlman (One), Daniel Emilfork (Krank), Judith Vittet (Miette), Dominique Pinon (diver/clones), Jean-Claude Dreyfus (Marcello), Genevieve Brunet (la Pieuvre), Odile Mallet (la Pieuvre), Mireille Mosse (Miss Bismuth), Serge Merlin (Leader
of the Cyclops)
Run Time: 108 minutes
Rating: *** out of *****
Theatres: Lido, Jurong.
This is a really weird film.
And it's dubbed, which I've come to accept in TCS 8 drama
serials, but which gets me really peeved when done anywhere else. These are probably the only two things that you
need to warned about before going into this movie, because other than
raving about how it's a marvellous sequel from the directors of 1991's
DELICATESSEN (Caro and Jeunet), and has brilliant photography (Darius
Khondji, who also did SEVEN) and imaginative set construction (Jean
Rabasse), most critics seem to convieniently leave these facts out.
Petty grievances aside, however, I ended up liking THE CITY OF LOST
CHILDREN quite a bit. It's a dark fantasy, filled with lots of
twisted-metal and wire contraptions, malevolent, freakish sects, and
intense, surreal emotions. The set is a nightmarish construction that visually borrows from the wickedly abnormal visions of
THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN and 12 MONKEYS (Terry Gilliam) and fuses them with the old-world fantasy telling of WILLOW and DUNE.
Living in a rig in the middle of a mist-shrouded sea is a dysfunctional
makeshift family of abnormal creations--a midget mother figure (Mireille
Mosse), a sibling collection of six identical, whining clones, and "Uncle Irvin," a brain preserved in a glass tank with a lens for sight and a gramophone for hearing. 
At the centre of the family is the scienti
st Krank (Daniel Emilfork), whose inability to dream is making him age immaturely. He therefore employs a group
of blind fanatics, known as the Cyclops, to kidnap young children from the
nearby harbour town. When captured, he straps them in sleeping cocoon-like structures and hooks them up to terrififying mind machines in order to steal their dreams from them. Dreams,
in the movie,
are associated with youth, happiness and innocence, which is why Krank prefers young children uncorrupted by life's hardships.
One of the boys taken by the Cyclops has an infantile brother, One
(Ron Perlman), who makes a living as the strong man in a nearby circus. Enraged, One sets out to recover his "little brother," and on the way runs into a band of pilfering street urchins
who are taught to steal and then sent on "missions" by an orphanage run
by a pair of Siamese twins collectively known as The Octupus (Genevieve
Brunet and Odile Mallet). One becomes friends with one of the orphans, a sharp, nine-year-old named Miette
(Judy Vittet), and they set off toward the rig to rescue his brother.
THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN is a beautiful film, not only for the vivid
"world" created by set designer Rabasse (that earned him a Cesar in
1995), but also for its cranky collage of unnerving ideas and twisted
landscapes, peppered with insane, genetic scientists,
mechanic eyes that enhance perception, trained, espionage flees and
ironically distorted perspectives. It is also a very much a world of
ideas. For example, youth is represented by beauty, as seen in
the many shots of innocent orphans with glowing ruby cheeks looking
wonderingly at their captors, and the converse is seen in the
genetically flawed and morally tainted baddies who roam the city looking
to exploit the orphans for some reason or other.
But this clear-cut good-bad contrast is probably the only thing that is
articulated properly in the film's coagulated storyline, which only gains momentum somewhere in the middle. The British-accented voices also tend to exarcebate things by giving the
dialogue a slightly absurd feel. Besides making it difficult to shake the feeling that I was watching the cast of Oliver! trapped in a set from BRAZIL (again from Terry Gilliam), there was the nagging feeling that Caro and Jeunet had dredged up the entire
cast of monks from THE NAME OF THE ROSE and re-cast them as the sect of one-eyed zealots in this film (see picture of bald man with complicated monacle above and tell me he's not the librarian who fancied Christian Slater in THE NAME OF THE ROSE).
Still, I think that THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN is worth $7 or $8, and you
should probably watch it in the theatres anyway, because it wouldn't
have the same effect on a TV screen. It runs a tight 108 minutes, has no
nudity in it, and is vastly entertaining if you're into films that don't
use explosions and bomb threats as their main story-telling device
(although there are also bombs in this film).
THE FLYING INKPOT's RATING SYSTEM:
* Wait for the video.
** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Gotcha!
*** Pretty good, bring a friend.
**** Amazing, potent stuff.
***** Perfection. See it twice.
Bilrius Finkelstein is a
wrinkled, old lady with several moles on her left shoulder.
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