The City of Lost Children (TCoLC), originally La Cité des Enfants Perdus, is a superb dark-comedic dystopian surrealist absurdist piece by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Picture this: a Christmas scene with a toddler sitting at a table near the fireplace. Suddenly, a rope drops through the chimney hole, and down the rope comes a smiling Santa Claus figure. But wait! that's not all -- soon enough, a second Santa drops by; and then, much to the child's horror, a third one and so on, just like that doppelganger nightmare that you've almost certainly had at least once as a child. Fascinating, isn't it? And to top it off, we find out that this is indeed a nightmare arising from the intertwining of two minds, of said toddler with that of a degenerate called Krank, who is unable to dream, and who, in the words of a brain in a vat called Irvin, has no soul of his own. And it so happens that when these "bad guys" steal the adoptive brother of One big strong guy, the guy in question, along with an orphan child, Miette, dive into a quest to save the little brother, thus unveiling, if nothing else, the absurd nature of that whole universe. An universe that, however absurd, has one hell of an internal coherency.
This coherency is achieved through a careful mix of intentionally chosen elements. The element of likeness, for example, is achieved through the doppelganger Santas as well as the clones, as well as the conjoined ladies who are portrayed almost as one person, doubled1. But then you also get a lot of contrast; such as, say, between Krank's utter cynicism and ability to put fear in children on one side, and the curiosity and fearlessness of the little brother who was stolen on the other; or between One's strength and his naïvete; or between the conjoined ladies themselves, who end up killing each other, and themselves. And there's also the tropes of madness, of ruthlessness, of addiction, of love, of circus, or why not, of failure; TCoLC is full of characters who in some long forgotten past were someone, only to have somehow -- we're not really told how -- turned into no one in particular.
The universe of TCoLC is also quite brutal in nature, despite its being wrapped in a French absurdist piece. The abduction of children is but one aspect; the viewer can inevitably see what sadness that world can be, devoid of any sort of sense of kinship between people and permeated with technology that is misused in all sorts of perverse ways. One can't help but feel that the whole reason why Krank can't dream is that that is the nightmare and his artificially induced dreams are but temporary places of escape. If you're wondering how come you've ended up living in your own sad world nowadays, then look no further -- Jeunet's piece explains quite clearly how things go in this sad reflection of a sad world, as if the thirty years between 1995 and 2025 had simply vanished. Everyone's fucking mad, I mean even One and Miette accept to some degree that that's the environment that they inhabit; in this world, the only sane person then becomes the insane Jonah who's ready to blow everything up; and just one moment before everything blows up, he himself slips back into the common madness.
My first contact with TCoLC was the video game with the same name. And even after I saw the movie, it took me quite a while to realize that the fantasy world is just a parable for my own, as if the French suddenly decided to summon their inner Ionesco all over again.
The imagery, much like in Jeunet's other films, is quite artsy-fartsy, but it's also quite dark, with many shades of red and rust. Also, the music was composed by none other than Lynch's own Angelo Badalamenti, which is quite fitting for a movie concerning dreams, and dream logic. It so happens that I've recently viewed Kubrick's (also superb) Eyes Wide Shut and... believe me when I say that the American drama of the emasculated man who tries to escape into the real world2 is no match for the French dystopia of the man-child and the old girl who want to save whatever little piece of innocence is left in this world. Maybe this is all just a matter of taste, but to my eye it's also very much a matter of depth.
TCoLC is quite a sad story with a supposedly nice ending -- I'd say that the ending doesn't tell the viewer anything in particular. Those three manage to get out of a mess, but the world, in all its madness, keeps on going, with no bright days in sight. So just as Marin Sorescu's modern Jonah keeps wading from one whale to another before offing himself, so does the viewer, upon taking his eyes off the credits roll and into his own world, step outside of a prison and into another, more familiar one, deluded by the thought that the world's not so bad. Sounds quite familiar, doesn't it3?
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The scene where one of them sucks on a cigarette and the other exhales the smoke was absolutely hilarious! ↩
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Don't get me wrong, Cruise does a great Billy Boy, and the whole thing is masterfully put together, not unlike other Kubrickian works. But at the same time the whole aura of occultism and social commentaryism that Eyes Wide Shut has garnered over the years is quite meh. High-class sex rings are news only to the very naïve nowadays, while the doltishness of people is much better portrayed by Judge's vulgar low-effort Idiocracy than by Kubrick's artsy-fartsy opus. Sorry America, I guess your movies weren't all that interesting to begin with... unless you're an American, I suppose. ↩
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Believe it or not, one of the more important matters of the twenty-first century, post-covid, is that of sane people finding each other, and overall of pockets of humanity surviving the times. No, it's not impossible, in fact quite the opposite, as many can readily attest, albeit perhaps not publicly. The tragedy, if we could call it such, is that the rest of you lot are just too busy catering to the madness to notice the world changing around you. ↩
"Believe it or not, one of the more important matters of the twenty-first century, post-covid, is that of sane people finding each other, and overall of pockets of humanity surviving the times. No, it's not impossible, in fact quite the opposite, as many can readily attest, albeit perhaps not publicly."
Aww. Had I a human heart in my chest as opposed to an agglomeration of black eldritch alien goo, it would be that much warmer upon reading this.