(LA CITE DES ENFANTS PERDUS)
**** (out of ****)
Starring Ron Perlman, Daniel Emilfork, Judith Vittet, Dominique Pinon, Genevieve Brunet, Odile Mallet, and Joseph Lucien
Directed by Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jenuet, written by Caro, Jenuet, Guillame Lareunt, and Gilles Adrien, & music by Angelo Badalamenti.
1995 R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 1995
“City of Lost Children,” in all its glorious, French craziness, is sort of like “The Graduate” or Charles Laughton’s brilliant “Night of the Hunter:” it is a movie about childhood, but definitely not for children. Most movies about childhood like to show the world full of innocence and wonder, but this is not how all children see the world. I remember the land of adults, as seen through my young eyes, as being creepy and incomprehensible. In its strange way, “City of Lost of Children” captures that in a world where all the children are basically normal but the adults are all grotesques, up to things the kids cannot even fathom.
The children in question are orphans in a port city that looks like a cross between the 1940s, the 1870s, and some unnamed date in the future. Everything seems to be built from the pieces of a trans-Atlantic steamer. The real location of “City of Lost Children” is the dreaming unconscious. Audiences who quibble over anachronisms or having their films set in what they like to think of as “reality,” whether it be present, past, or future, will have long since been driven insane before the film is a third over. Audiences that love the visuals of “Blade Runner,” “Metropolis,” “Legend,” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” will gobble this movie up. The orphans live in a corrupt orphanage run by the Octopus, (Genevieve Brunet and Odile Mallet) a pair of conjoined twins with a shared leg who know when to scratch itches on the other’s arm. They, or she, order the orphans to pickpocket in order to earn their keep. The Octopus is unconcerned when, one by one, the children start to go missing. Soon it is up to the young Miette (Judith Vittet) to find them, and to do so she enlists the help of One (Ron Perlman), the strongman from the carnival, who has the mind of a simpleton probably because the actor can’t speak much French.
In their misadventures through the best art direction and special effects of 1995, they meet an opium addict whose mechanical fly can turn those its stings into homicidal maniacs; a cult that demands the removal of one eye from each of its members to make room for an electronic replacement; a brain living in a fish tank that is able to speak through a device like an old phonograph; a pack of incompetent clones bickering over who is the original (all played in near-slapstick by Dominique Pinon); and ultimately a mad old scientist named Krank (Daniel Emilfork), who is kidnapping the children to steal their dreams because he cannot sleep. Krank is both terrifying and sad, often at the same time. There are spurts of violence, which are not in protracted action sequences or especially gory, but imaginatively disturbing, and incorporate the kind of dark, dry sense of humor that leaves a dwarf pinned to a wall by a harpoon.
The story of “City of Lost Children,” some have complained, is told in such a manner as to be incomprehensible to the point of being impenetrable. This works, I think, in the movie’s favor, in creating a childhood view of confusion and fear, like a Grimm bedtime story crossed with the nightmare that comes after hearing it. Episodes only half-lead to other episodes, in the same way that, when dreaming, we’re never able to see very far ahead of us, and are at best bogged down in one thing at a time. Most mature moviegoers will admit that, in certain movies, confusion is a good thing, but we all have a threshold for how much bafflement we can take. I, for example, have no problems with “Mulholland Drive” and even enjoyed “Lost Highway” without really comprehending more than ten minutes of it at once. But I have to draw the line at the film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” Some audiences take cinematic weirdness better than others, and I had no problem absorbing “City of Lost Children.”
I saw “City of Lost Children” at a midnight screening during a two-day revival in the summer of 1999. The screen was big, the camera angles were way out, and the print was just a little worn, which added to the movie’s eerie mystique. By two-thirty in the morning I was pretty tired but I never once lost interest in the bizarre images being paraded across the screen. This is perhaps the optimum situation for viewing “Lost Children,” which in itself is somewhere between waking and sleeping. This is not a film of plot or especially of character, although I did sympathize with One’s frustration at his own simplicity, as well as Krank’s inability to dream. The aim of “City of Lost Children” is to immerse us in the bizarre visions of a nightmare world, and to remember, however vaguely, what it was like to be a child and afraid.
Finished June 16, 2002.
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