CITY OF LOST CHILDREN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: This is a bizarre and wonderful
French fantasy that defies description. In a
never-never land that seems to combine Marseilles
at the turn of the last century and the next, the
evil scientist Krank kidnaps children to steal
their nightmares. He is opposed by a carnival
strongman and a young girl. This is one of the
most visually creative films ever made, combining
the style of BRAZIL with a wall-to-wall creativity
almost rivaling THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.
Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4)
The plot is almost as bizarre and complex as the characters. Evil Krank (played by Daniel Emilfork) has lost the ability to dream and as a result is aging before his time. He can preserve his life by kidnapping children and stealing their dreams. To do this kidnapping he has a band of video-enhanced henchmen called Cyclopes. They steal children and bring them to his fortress in an off-shore oil derrick. There he keeps a philosophical brain alive in a tank and is tended by six identical clones (all played by Dominique Pinon seamlessly rematted into the same frame as many as seven times since he also plays a diver) and their dwarf mother (Mireille Mosse). Pitted against Krank is One (Ron Perlman), an inarticulate carnival strongman looking for his adopted little brother who has been kidnapped. He is joined by a young thief Miette (Judith Vittet) from the local band of child criminals ruled over by the villainous Octopus, a pair of Siamese twins played by Genevieve Brunet and Odile Mallet. Now have I left any of the weird character out? Yes, lots of them. But I do not have the space to list them all.
The film is the brainchild--or is it the enfant terrible--of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, who in 1991 gave us DELICATESSEN, a popular but not fully realized post-holocaust comedy. This time they have created a film that will be hard for them ever to match. This is a creation that is so full of visual wonders that it really needs to be well-dubbed since the eye is much too busy to read subtitles translating the French. The visual style is very much like that of Terry Gilliam in BRAZIL with if anything a darker sense of humor. But the density of images is somewhere between that of BRAZIL and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. (I saw the trailer for the film perhaps eight times before I noticed the screaming faces in the green nightmare smoke! That is just the kind of film it is. By comparison 12 MONKEYS's imagery i simplistic.)
The film has a nifty set of sequences that work like something out of either Rube Goldberg or "Mission Impossible." One sequence asks the question if you want to get into a locked room, why would you start by grating cheese onto the floor? Another follows a miraculous set of events that shut down a city because one tear flew through the air. This is a film of often jaw-dropping imagination. Few faces will be familiar to American audiences, though it does star Ron Perlman of TV's "Beauty and the Beast" and CRONOS. Daniel Emilfork will be a pleasant surprise for audiences who have not seen him before, though he did make an excellent devil in the surprising horror film, THE DEVIL'S NIGHTMARE.
For those with a taste for the unique or who just want to be weirded out by the creatively bizarre, this is an amazing film. Mostly for its originality I give it a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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