The Illusionist (2010)

Screenplay by Jacques Tati
Adapted and Directed by Sylvain Chomet

Sylvain Chomet is probably best noted in the USA for this 2003 indie hit animation feature The Triplets of Belleville.

The Illusionist is another animated feature. It is in all practicality a new animated feature starring the great Jacques Tati.

Animated Jacques Tati plays The Illusionist, a music hall, vaudeville, magician in a world that is passing him by. He travels about with a top hat, a white rabbit, his case of tricks, and performs in near empty theaters or theaters filled with rock fans that leave when The Illusionist’s act comes on. In this way it is indeed very Tati like, fitting in well with his other movies in which the Tati mostly silent character is dealing with a constantly changing, a baffling new world. We have seen the Tati character dealing with the ultra-modern superstructure of Playtime, the automobiles in Traffic, the home of modern convenience in Mon Oncle. In this he is not so much lost in modernity but displaced by it, an old thing, former attraction of a sort that is ignored. Yet the story, ripe for pathos, does traffic in that at all.
 
The Illusionist is also a sort of odd love story. In his travels he stays in a rooming house where a young sweeper woman, a chambermaid, takes notice of him. When he leaves on the train for his next little job he finds that she is tagging along. She is his odd little companion. He wants to please her and works to earn money to buy her things she covets in the city store windows. He dresses her in a new dress and white high heels. He helps the modest chambermaid country girl become modern, a part of the modern new world that is leaving him behind. The new can’t help but move on from the old, if it wants to have a full life in the now. It’s not so much sad as predictably, naturally inevitable, as it really should be.
 
The movie is like most of Tati’s work, a silent movie. The whole of it shot wide full body shots. Just as Tati presented himself. There is not a single close-up. We are looking on at the characters not delving inside them. But what they do in their surroundings shows us all we need to know of who they are without the intrusion of intimacy.
Sylvain Chomet’s Tati is very much like the master’s movie characters in his stuttering full body back and forth movements with his hat and overcoat. It is really a beautiful tribute to Tati and not unlike a brand new Tati movie.

There is a lot of pictorial beauty in the movie, the cityscape is rendered in detail. It is a beautiful movie from inside and out. A masterwork that lovers of silent pantomime cinema and animation should not miss.