The City of Lost Children opens with an ideal image of Christmas Eve. A young boy waits anxiously in his room while a wind-up toy claps happily and snow falls gently outside the window. Santa Claus slides down the chimney, looking exactly as we might imagine: jolly, fat, white-bearded, dressed in red. Then another Santa appears in the fireplace, followed by another. Suddenly, the whole room is filled with Santas. The boy begins to scream. A reindeer shits on the floor. One Santa takes a swig of whiskey. The image becomes distorted, and the child's bedroom bends out of proportion. Dream has become nightmare; the place of innocence a perversion of the ideals of purity.
This, of course, is the world of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, creators of 1991's brilliant Delicatessen, a post-apocalyptic tale of cannibalism and machinery. The City of Lost Children, recently released in America and currently showing at York Square, boasts even more stunning visual effects than Jeunet and Caro's debut film. But while many critics have criticized the overwhelmingly delicious images for obscuring the film's narrative, the story of The City of Lost Children is as riveting as its magnificent design. It is a fantasy that dwarfs any recent American movie of that genre.
The child of the film's opening scene has been abducted by the aging recluse Krank (Daniel Emilfork), whose central weakness is his inability to dream. His henchmen, seven clones (all played, with outstanding precision and the great help of computers, by Dominique Pinon, the star of Delicatessen), kidnap children and rig them up to an apparatus that transfers their dreams to Krank. But the older, adoptive brother of the young boy, a strongman named One (Ron Perlman, of Cronos and TV's Beauty and the Beast) is determined to rescue the child and sets off on a quest for Krank's aquatic hideaway. Jeunet and Caro thus set into motion a classic epic storyline: the hero's rescue of an archetypal figure of innocence from the hands of evil.
But in the warped vision of Jeunet and Caro, the story could never follow the simple motifs and structures of tradition. Instead, their heroic One first comes across a roving band of orphans, controlled by Siamese twins involved in jewel theft. The kid leader of the group, Miette (Judith Vittet, the most beautiful nine-year-old in screen history), is also searching for children abducted by Krank. Together, One and Miette must avoid the wickedly synchronistic Siamese twins, a gang of artificially-seeing Cyclopes, ubiquitous insects with a potent venom, harlots, steamliners, midgets with guns, and the pitfalls of Krank's labyrinthine castle. Finally, the characters of The City of Lost Children are subject to the very perturbations and distortions of the screen. One and Miette, in their quest to liberate the children, must avoid the warping of their - and our - sense of temporal and spatial reality.
The City of Lost Children is a sprawling film, lacking the tight unity of place of Delicatessen's butcher shop. In fact, Jeunet's and Caro's view of the fantastic in their earlier film seemed to depend on universal synchronicity; one need only recall the famous scene in which a couple makes love on a squeaky bed and the actions of the entire building move in tempo to the perfect beat. Knives are sharpened, cellos are played, an entire structure depends upon the unifying force of a single action. But The City of Lost Children, although its action spans great distances, continues Jeunet's and Caro's marvelous vision of widespread uniformity and interconnection. As One and Miette face destruction, a single tear shed from Miette's eye triggers an extensive sequence of cause and effect, leading to the waking of a dog, the evacuation of a whorehouse, the blackout of a city, and the crash of an enormous ship. If the film proves anything, it is that even the most disparate elements of action are linked in an elaborate train of connections and coincidence. Jeunet and Caro can only pull this off through the astonishing morphing of their images and the unifying, haunting score of Angelo Badalamenti, composer for many David Lynch films.
The City of Lost Children manipulates this unity and synchronicity most of all in its treatment of its central theme: the dreamworld. As an ode to the surreal, Jeunet and Caro's film emphasizes the malleable nature of reverie and its persistence in escaping even the hands of thieves. The film's slight bending of the image, the privileging of distortion and dissolve over jump-cutting, and the easy passage from the ideal to the nightmarish demonstrate that only a film as metamorphosing as The City of Lost Children can begin to represent the mutation of dreams.
Much has been made of the cost of making The City of Lost Children. Indeed, due to its elaborate special effects and incredible set design, it is one of the most expensive French film made to date. But its price? A mere $18 million dollars, not nearly enough to pay for the services of a Sly Stallone or Jim Carrey. If Hollywood paid attention not to greed and ego but to talent, not to mention to the visionary genius of the likes of Jeunet and Caro, we might begin to make the quality films that only sometimes cross the Atlantic to our side.
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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