Grandma rescued from Hell? Or just moving to another circle?
Everyone has a list of favorite movies, and on mine is the animated film The Triplets of Belleville (2003). I recall reading a dictum once, from Roger Zelazny or Robert Heinlein, that if you’re going to break a rule, break it big and make it a virtue. Sylvain Chomet, the force behind this French movie, indeed does that through his dogged employment of stereotypes, pushing, exploring, magnifying, and eventually even mutating them until they begin to return to life.
The plot may not be classic in itself, but it touches on a central pillar of the mythos of Western culture: family. Grandma finds herself with the responsibility of raising her young grandson, Bruno, already adorned with a stately Gallic nose, while the great city of Paris overtakes their quiet village. She eventually discovers what will be his great passion: biking.
We jump forward in time to see his training for, of course, the Tour de France (or its equivalent in Chomet’s world), and here we’re introduced to one of Chomet’s predilections: to go over the top with all flags flying. Grandma still cares for Bruno, from monitoring his practices by following him madly on a tricycle, to his post biking cool off period, using a lawnmower to administer a bone crunching back rub.
Then comes the great race. Grandma employs a small panel truck to follow her grandson through the race. But evil lurks, and it has a handful of tacks, strewn in the panel truck’s path. As she and her driver labor to change the tire, her grandson, who has exhausted himself and must drop out of the race, is kidnapped (along with other racers) by a mysterious pair of henchmen.
When Grandma realizes Bruno has disappeared, they hurry along the race course, and then employ the family dog, Champion, to find Bruno. The trail leads to an immense ship, just exiting the port, but is Grandma foiled? No. She scurries down to the beach and rents a pedal boat, and Champion and she follow the great ship across the ocean.
To Belleville. Her adventures in Belleville, home of the fattest Lady Liberty ever conceived, I leave to the reader to discover.
In Triplets, it feels like each frame of this movie has been uniquely imagined, stereotypes recognized studied, magnified, and employed for the messages they implicitly carry. One of Chomet’s frequent methods is to focus on his characters eyes, reflecting their inner mental states through them as they react to food, life, death.
The visuals are frequently beautiful, even in the portrayal of evil, freely breaking the laws of physics to deliver sometimes just stark visuals, and sometimes to suggest the laws of a just society might be more important than the profits of a criminal gang made on the backs of their prisoners. Thus we see a baby in a carriage, struck by a car driven by henchmen of the antagonist, and the result: a crumpled, destroyed car.
The audio is special. First, the songs are catchy and contribute positively to the whimsical atmosphere of this movie. Second, much like the visuals, the background sounds are often emphasized for the small stories they tell. This leaves the final component of audio, the dialog.
It’s non-existent.
This is a wise decision by Chomet. First, it makes the movie far more accessible to non-French audiences; captioning and dubbing are always problematic choices. Far more importantly, though, this lack of dialog forces us to Watch This Movie, to watch it with far greater intensity than we might otherwise employ. This intensity drags us into the world of Chomet, of Grandma and Bruno and immensely fat Americans, who I can see even now. It gives us the internal logic of the plot and the characters simply by forcing us to study the movie more intensely than other movies.
When I began my most recent viewing of Triplets, I was interested in seeing it again because it had been several years, and I wondered how much my imagination and affection for the movie had colored its memory, and how much I would be disappointed in comparing memory with reality.
I wasn’t. It was really as charming and fascinating as I recalled it to be.
Strongly Recommended. If you have and value your sense of whimsy, you should enjoy this.
