L’Illusionniste (2010) - film review

The end of the 1950s brought a new phenomenon to the music hall, rock music.  It was fresh young rock stars who drew the crowds now, not traditional artistes like acrobats, jugglers or ventriloquists.  A conjuror fears that his is a dying art.  Unable to find work in Paris, he packs up his doves and heads for London, but he has no luck here either.  He is reduced to appearing in small theatres, at garden parties or in cafés.  Whilst performing in a village pub on the west coast of Scotland, he meets Alice, a young woman who will change his life forever...

Jacques Tati lives again, thanks to the efforts of Sylvain Chomet and his Edinburgh-based team of animators.  Chomet is of course the man who brought us the beguiling but frankly weird Tour de France-themed animated feature Les Triplettes de Belleville, a major hit in 2003.  Chomet now employs the same style of classic 2D animation for his follow-up feature, which is a melancholic study on the decline of the music hall in the 1950s.  If you are wondering where Jacques Tati fits into this, well the film is adapted from a screenplay which he wrote in the mid-1950s, intending it to be his next film after Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953).  In the end, Tati decided not to make the film because he felt its subject was too serious.

Sylvain Chomet had previously resurrected Jacques Tati for a cameo appearance in Les Triplettes de Belleville, and it is this little homage which prompted the comedian’s daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, to offer Chomet the screenplay for his unmade film.  Chomet repaid this compliment handsomely not only by creating a magical work of art from Tati’s script but by making the film a celebration of Tati and his oeuvre.  Fans of Jacques Tati will doubtless derive great satisfaction from spotting the numerous references to his films in L’Illusionniste.

Since Tati was himself closely associated with the music hall in his youth, the film naturally has an autobiographical element to it.  The music hall was where Tati began his career in the 1930s, performing mime acts of various kinds of sportsmen.  The plot of L’Illusionniste  reflects Tati’s dwindling popularity in his later years and his struggle to keep going at a time when cinema audiences had lost interest in him.  It is apparent that the main character in the film is Tati himself, a lonely figure who is tragically driven to keep alive a dying art, with little chance of success.

L’Illusionniste is a a film that is worthy of Jacques Tati himself.  Like Tati’s own work, this film is understated yet exquisitely poignant, and crafted with intelligence and tenderness.   Chomet and his team achieve a perfect balance between humour and pathos, ending up with pretty well what its author had envisaged, Tati’s own version of Chaplin’s Limelight.  Yet the film is more than just a tribute to Jacques Tati.  It is a heartfelt lament to the passing of the music hall and to the innumerable diverse talents who once had audiences in their thrall.  Those were the days, my friend...

© James Travers 2010

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