(BELLEVILLE RENDEZ-VOUS)
**** (out of ****)
Featuring the voices of Michele Caucheteux, Jean-Claude Donda, Michel Robin, and Monica Viegas
Directed & written by Sylvain Chomet, with original music by Benoit Charest, and title song by Mathieu Chedid
2003
80 min PG13
Dozen-or-so Best Films of 2003
The big-screen teaser for “The Triplets of Belleville” was so filled with oddities, wonders, and wildness that tears of joy were running down my face just from the sight of them. The preview makes the movie look like a hallucination that had started to hallucinate, or the kind of movie that if more people saw there would be less drug abuse. The film itself, though, is more leisurely paced than that, but it is still the wackiest fun you’re likely to have at the movies this year. It’s also a refreshing animated alternative to blood-soaked anime, or kiddie-friendly Disney fare, which it gently lampoons.
Set somewhere around the 1950s, its basic plot is simplicity itself, about a young man named Champion who enters the Tour-de-France, only to be kidnapped by gangsters and held captive in an industrial Babel known as Belleville. His rescue is in the hands of Madame de Souza, his squat, near-sighted, limping, and absolutely adorable grandmother. She is joined by their bloated mutt Bruno and the Triplets of Belleville. The Triplets were a once-great singing act, but are now elderly and subsisting off a diet consisting mainly of amphibians. “Triplets of Belleville” features only a handful of spoken lines, many of them in French and without subtitles. We know what’s going on anyway and the characters are given various dialogue substitutes, such as Madame de Souza’s whistle, Bruno’s noisy grumbles, the exhausted groans of the bicyclists, and an endless string of cigars and cigarettes, which are variously tapped, chewed on, or flicked off.
The movie’s animation, from French comic book artist-turned-filmmaker Sylvain Chomet, is somewhere between the Disney of “101 Dalmatians” and “American Splendor.” Everyone looks cute, but this is the kind of movie not above letting us see grandma’s faint mustache or Bruno’s dangling bits. Our wild ride alternates between the same sepia and blue-tint used in silent films, and includes stops at a froggy swamp, the bug-buzzing French countryside, the impossibly high and ghastly towers of Belleville, countless dank alleys, and a trip across the ocean as good as anything in “Finding Nemo.” Characters along the way range from the gently caricatured to the hilariously grotesque. Identical gangsters light each other’s cigarettes, an accordion diva riding along behind the bicyclists gets splattered with bugs, hapless frogs flee from the Triplets, and a whale creeps beneath Bruno and our brave little Madame de Souza.
Of course “Triplets of Belleville” functions on the craziest of crazy cartoon logic. It’s also paced like the jazz music it uses throughout and happily uses tangents about Bruno’s dog dreams to exploit that nutty logic. When Madame de Souza decides how she’s going to cross the Atlantic, well, that’s the way it shall be. Bicyclists make horse noises, are treated like cattle, and Champion’s snout-like nose and utter passivity are both distinctly equine. There’s a scene in which realists, assuming the movie hasn’t already caused their heads to explode, will need to be convinced that he is drugged. But I suspect he is behaving in a manner directly related to the core of his being, which requires no narcotic. Music throughout the movie is made on household objects in ingenious ways that would definitely not work in reality, and hearing the terrific Django Rheinhardt-style theme song, which is currently up for an Oscar, is a real treat.
But all this would be empty spectacle if we didn’t feel sympathetic toward the characters. Despite their outlandishness, I did. They are who they are, whether it be ugly (the grandma), hopelessly passive (Champion), obscenely overweight (Bruno), or just plain daffy (the Triplets), but they deal with it. Madame de Souza may not be the smartest, strongest, or most interesting person to grace the silver screen in 2003, but she’s certainly the person everyone should have in their lives: selfless, resourceful, undaunted, patient, and always able to muster a smile. She’s the kind of grandma who really would have an unused piano gathering dust somewhere and a portrait of the Blessed Virgin amidst all her clutter. The opening scenes of her and a young Champion are simple and heartbreaking as she tries to cheer up the young orphan through her minimal musical skills, a puppy, and eventually hits the jackpot with a new tricycle. Within these opening minutes, I already felt more for these people than in the ten hours of “Lord of the Rings.”
As for Bruno, he is perhaps the most realistic dog I’ve ever seen in a movie, animated or otherwise. His goals in life include barking at trains, eating his dinner with such heedless abandon that he pushes his bowl around, and jumping up on top of Champion the instant he falls asleep at night. Every character in “Triplets of Belleville” exists on its own terms, and not as wisecracking modern figures transported back in time.
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