Bringing to life Jacques Tati’s unproduced original script, the void between magic and reality reconciles in French director Sylvain Chomet’s latest animation feature, The Illusionist.
Loosely autobiographical of Tati’s own stage career, this melancholic comedy documents the journey of Tatischeff, a classic French magician. Having captured the adoring youthful eye of Alice, a Scottish pub-worker, the pair travels to Edinburgh where Tatischeff’s mystical antics are challenged by post-war commercialism. As the disbelieving, new-age consumerist attitude threatens his career, Alice’s ever-growing materialistic desires also strain Tatischeff’s ability to craft fantasy from their bleak surroundings.
At once inspiring, challenging, enlightening and heartbreaking, Chomet’s work is fantastically mystifying yet grounds itself in tragic realism. There’s a sheer magic in the nostalgic, fluid artistry of Chomet’s hand-drawn animation. However, it is in the detailed movement and abstract bleets of communication between his alien characters that Tati’s story flourishes as an utterly mature tale of displacement, reality and coming-of-age.
The Illusionist, directed by Sylvain Chomet – now showing exclusively at Cinema Nova, Carlton. See http://www.cinemanova.com.au/session_times.html for session times.
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