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MovieMail's Review
Based on a 1956 script The Illusionist may well be the greatest Jacques Tati film never made. Milo Wakelin watches spellbound at the animated follow-up to Belleville Rendez-vous.
Based on a 1956 script labelled simply Film Tati Nş 4, The Illusionist may well be the greatest Jacques Tati film never made. Adapted by animator Sylvain Chomet from Tati's unproduced script, it's a hand-crafted, bittersweet reflection on the legacy of Tati the filmmaker, and Monsieur Hulot the cinematic icon.
The story follows a late middle-aged magician as he moves from venue to venue, struggling to find work. He relocates to London, his fierce stage rabbit in tow, but finds audiences are more interested in rock n' roll than his dated brand of genteel vaudeville. The only gig he can find is on the remote Scottish Isle of Iona, to celebrate its connection to the mainland electricity grid. There, he meets an innocent young girl, and his simple parlour tricks inadvertently convince her his powers are for real. He showers her with gifts, which he produces as if by magic. But when she follows him to Edinburgh, he is forced to take a second job to make ends meet, and sustain her childlike sense of wonder.
Chomet faithfully recreates Tati's eye for whimsy, his knack for slapstick, his impeccable comic timing, and his well-known disdain for materialism, and this beautifully-made film is underscored by a gentle sense of melancholy for a lost era of vaudeville and silent film making.
Controversy remains surrounding the inspiration for Tati's original script. In 1942, Tati fathered an illegitimate child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, whom he later abandoned; her family maintain Tati wrote The Illusionist by way of acknowledgement and atonement. For his part, Chomet has said he believes the film was written for Tati's younger daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, born 1946, to apologise for his absence during the making of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958).
This biographical conundrum may never be satisfactorily resolved, and Chomet's film sensibly excludes neither possibility. The relationship between the magician and the young girl is sensitively depicted and deeply moving, and the older man's attempts to secure the adoration of a daughter figure through gifts, while keeping her sheltered from the realities of the world and his own true character, speaks not only to Tati's own personal anxieties about his role as a father, but also to the wider relationship between an artist and his audience.
Chomet directs each scene as if he were working with real actors, avoiding the overt caricatures and visual flights of fancy of Belleville Rendez-vous; like Studio Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies (1988) or Whisper of the Heart (1995), The Illusionist feels like a live action film that just so happens to be animated.
Made in Edinburgh by an international group of artists, The Illusionist is also the finest animated depiction of the British Isles since Martin Rosen's Watership Down (1978) and The Plague Dogs (1982). The magician's journey to Scotland, and a birds eye view of late 1950s Edinburgh, are breathtaking and evocative in a way that even Pixar's CGI vistas do not match, and fans of the BFI's British Transport Films (or anyone with a penchant for 50s trains, ferries and automobiles) will find much to adore.
A wonderful hand-painted animated feature from Sylvain Chomet (Belleville Rendezvous), The Illusionist is based on an unproduced script that the French director Jacques Tati wrote in 1956 for his daughter.
Set in the late 1950s, the film tells the story of an ageing illusionist whose career on the stage has come under threat from the increasing popularity of cinema and pop music. No longer able to find an audience for his card tricks and rabbit-out-of-a-hat routine, he takes to the road in the hope of earning a living elsewhere. When he travels to an isolated community in Scotland, he meets a girl who is convinced that he is a real magician, and a special bond develops between the two.
Bittersweet, melancholy and filled with the atmosphere of its era, this is a beautiful film whose every frame reveals its hand-crafted artistry. It also brings the magic of the incomparable Jacques Tati to life once more.
