The Triplets of Belleville
Directed and written!
by Sylvain Chomet!
Starring a club-footed granny,!
a sad-eyed lad and a snarling dog!
Classification: G!
Rating: ***½!
Syllogism of the day: Every good movie isn't necessarily hard to describe, but every movie that's hard to describe is necessarily good. I'm talking about films so wedded to their medium, so tightly a fusion of sight and sound, that they dodge the explanatory lasso of mere words. Being John Malkovich is a fairly recent example — even its plot has to be seen to be appreciated. Now add The Triplets of Belleville to that short list. And did I mention it's a cartoon?
But that too makes for a refreshing change. In an era when live-action movies often play like cartoons, this is an animated film that feels all grown up. Not X-rated, though, not a return to the Ralph Bakshi school of Fritz the Cat scatology. No, it owes nothing to the potty mouth of Bakshi and a lot to the eerie mind of Maurice Sendak. So you can happily take along the children, and it might be fun to compare your responses. My guess is that, from 8 to 80, they'll all be pretty much the same: "Never seen anything like this before. It's really weird and, somehow, wonderful."
Enough stalling. Let's move on to the daunting task of describing the indescribable, at least after a short stop to affix a proprietorial label or two.
The picture's funding — this is a Franco-Belgian-Canadian co-production — is as well-travelled as its creator: Sylvain Chomet, an animator who, typical of his beleaguered breed, has been down and out in Paris and London and lately Montreal, scrabbling for the means to pursue his passion. The influences he cites are all rearward facing: the golden age of Disney, the surreal lines of Betty Boop, the stoic sadness of Buster Keaton, the visual whimsy of Jacques Tati. But these are just more labels, and don't begin to explain what Chomet has wrought.
Consider the opening frames: In a smoky nightclub, an art-deco boîte that hints at the thirties, the triplets of the title are singing on stage. They're a sister act belting out a jazzy tune whose rhythms are pure swing but whose lyrics are unintelligible, scatted words poised on the cusp of meaning. A stylish dancer appears, Astaire-like, and is swallowed by his own shoe. A sultry babe surfaces, Josephine Baker-ish, and gets attacked by her own boa. Then the lens pulls back — Chomet is an animator who knows about camera angles — to reveal that all of this is actually a television show, being watched in a humble Parisian apartment by an elderly lady and a small child.
The old woman, Madame Souza, has a club foot. The child, Champion, is her grandson, and seems to be an orphan. On the mantle, a photograph offers a glimpse of a posed couple, presumably his parents, with the man straddling a bicycle. The boy appears lonely and reclusive, although this must be intuited — there's virtually no dialogue here and throughout.
Possibly to cheer him up, his granny buys a puppy, which promptly barks angrily at the kid's toy train. Remember that bark — you'll hear a lot of it.
Flash-forward several years, to the postwar fifties of De Gaulle, when the pup has grown into a snarling dog and the boy into an athletic young man. His face is melancholic, like Keaton's, and his upper body is slim. But those thighs and calves are something else entirely — bulging, grotesquely inflated, a muscled caricature of a competitive cyclist. Apparently, he is his Daddy's son, and his granny is his whistle-tooting trainer — stern in her demands, yet loving in her ministrations.
The drawing here is sepia-toned, yellow and brown and burnt orange, a perfect reflection of a mood that paints tiny flecks of humour onto a broad wall of poignancy. For example, watch for a touching sequence, slow and extended, that follows a hard day of training. The trio return to the apartment. The tireless granny prepares dinner, then settles in to fix the spokes on a damaged bicycle wheel. The exhausted Champion slumps over the table, devouring his food without a murmur of thanks. The ravenous dog pants on the floor, awaiting any scrap from his distracted master. Night falls, and sleep beckons for all. After a punctual yap at a passing train, the pooch too falls into a reverie — then the film falls with him, and we're suddenly sharing a doggie dream, funny and beguilingly odd.
When Champion enters the Tour de France, the picture kicks into a higher kinetic gear. The action literally speeds up and, with a computer-generated assist, the animation adds an occasional third dimension to the traditional two, enriching the overall look.
The plot also takes a new twist. Members of the French Mafia, black-granite thugs shaped like trench-coated rectangles, kidnap Champion right out of the race, then stick him on a skinny freighter bound for the deep Atlantic. Getting wind of the treachery, Granny steals a paddleboat and chugs out to the high seas in determined pursuit. This ocean-crossing scene, darkly illustrated and scored to Mozart's C-minor Mass, is an animated gem unto itself — haunting, gorgeous.
The rest is a sort of bizarre chase movie, with everyone landing up in the New World city of Belleville, a parodied Manhattan where the denizens are all as obscenely fat as the swollen Statue of Liberty that presides over them, encouraging their rapacious consumption. There, still chasing her missing grandson, Granny hooks ups with the triplets from the opening frames. Ancient crones now, they've fallen on hard times, living in a squalid tenement and reduced to dynamiting the East River for their daily feed of blasted frogs, gathered and served up as a multicourse feast — frog soup, frog-ke-bob, frog-sicles.
Bizarre, indeed. But it gets even weirder and, admittedly, just a bit tedious as the end nears.
However, in a feature whose running time is a scant 80 minutes, the tedium can be measured in seconds, and does little to dim the eerie magic.
Yet what does the magic mean? Well, perhaps magic is its own meaning.
It's like that jazzy tune sung by the triplets: The words lie just beyond our comprehension, but the feeling doesn't. Here, mood and theme, magic and meaning, are inextricable. And they all combine in the extraordinary presence of Granny, an aged figure who doubles as an ageless feeling.
Because, as she doggedly pursues the lost object of her affection, what is Granny but love with a club foot — indefatigable, illogical, stern, stubborn, kind, cartoonish, fantastic and so very real.
