No one who’s fallen for the timeless and charmingly antic worlds of Sylvain Chomet will be disappointed by this poignant eulogy to one of France’s great, if now decidedly uncool 20th century artists. Here, the French animator swaps the escapist fantasias of The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Illusionist (2010) for a biopic that, while more conventional, still holds wonders of its own in its depiction of an extraordinary career and 60-odd eventful years of French history.
The life in question belongs to inventor, teacher, playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol (voiced by Laurent Lafitte). Best know outside the Republic as the author of Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources, but a fixture on school syllabuses in his homeland, he’s introduced receiving a smattering of applause in a sparsely attended Parisian theatre in 1956. Well-meaning friends note that soaring petrol prices caused by the Suez crisis are keeping people at home. Pagnol, though, knows his star is waned. ‘The young will sweep us under the carpet,’ he later laments at a soirée at his home, a grand Parisian pile taking on the air of a mausoleum.
An artist confronted by his own obsolescence, Pagnol is reluctantly forced into one final act of creation: a memoir that’s to be serialised by Elle magazine. Flashbacks to the eventful chapters he jots down make up the meat of the film. It’s a framing device you’ve seen a hundred times before, but Chomet freshens it up by introducing the younger Pagnol as a guide to his own journey from the dry hills of Marseille to the bright lights of Paris’s pre-war arts scene, via his 1931 breakout talkie Marius and run-ins with the Nazi film industry during the Occupation.
Chomet is a kind of earthbound French cousin to Hayao Miyazaki
At 61, the same age as Pagnol as he sits down to write his memoir, Chomet clearly has his mind on legacy too; questions of which art endures and which doesn’t haunt the story. The fickleness of time, too, as the exuberant, rough-and-tumble Pagnol gradually becomes more owlish and introspective, haunted by the need for his father’s approval and victim of a lifetime of snobbery from Parisians looking down on his provincial origins. (The English dubbed version swaps out the Marseille accent for a cockney one.)
Chomet’s handmade-style animations, filled with larger-than-life characters with an affectionate touch of caricature, locate him as a kind of earthbound French cousin to Hayao Miyazaki. The comparison is lofty but fair – and not because both animators have their own couch gag on The Simpsons. Chomet shares his Japanese peer’s generosity, humanism and knack for illuminating the everyday with a sense of wonderment. All three are present in this warm-hearted hymn to another unique Gallic artist.
A Magnificent Life premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
