#648: The City of Lost Children
Well it’s not Terry Gilliam, but it sure is French
Initial release: May 17th, 1995
Directors: Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Some movies are inexplicable. They must be seen to be believed. They’re so outlandish, so eccentrically shot and edited, that they take on an identity unlike any other movie. Well, unless you’re Terry Gilliam, in which case you make a lot of movies like that. The City of Lost Children, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bizarre steampunk opus, isn’t a Terry Gilliam movie, but that’s only because it’s all in French.
The City of Lost Children, or La Cité des Enfants Perdus as it’s known in French, is at its core about dreams; and like dreams, it is dreamlike, operating on its own logic. The film opens with a child being visited by Santa Claus, but before long, the room begins to fill up with Santas, too many in fact, most of them drunk. It’s a nightmare, and it’s not just the nightmare of a child, but it is also the nightmare of Krank the mad scientist who is attempting to steal the dreams of children, for he has none of his own. Yet he is a terrifying figure, too tall, too skinny, with a face like an axe; the children he kidnaps cannot help but have nightmares, and so the search for a normal dream continues.
Across the sea from the converted oil rig upon which Krank lives with his fellows — all of whom are the creations of a deposed scientist — is a squalid French city, of no particular time-frame though possibly somewhere between the world wars (if not some ridiculous post-apocalypse future like Delicatessen) consisting of narrow alleys, fetid piers and sticky-fingered orphans. Somewhere in this rat’s nest is a sailor-turned-circus strongman One, a poor speaker of French but smarter than he looks — but that’s Ron Perlman for you! — and his adopted little brother Denrée (translated into English as “Grub.”) When said little brother is kidnapped by Krank’s hired goons — themselves members of a cult that willfully blinds themselves and wears quasi-futuristic electronic eyepieces to see — One sets out to find him. Along the way he meets Miette (or “Crumb” in English — and yes, this matters for a particular scene!) and the gang of orphans she runs with, all of them forced by a sinister pair of conjoined twins collectively called “the Octopus” to steal money and valuables from around the city. The ones who fail get sent to Krank.
This is a movie that has a lot going on. The grime-encrusted port city, nameless and byzantine, provides a sinister backdrop, at once overcrowded yet liminal, an endless maze of alleys and quays, like a filthy, industrial version of Venice. The converted oil rig is equal parts wrought-iron monstrosity and twisted art nouveau fever dream. Most of the tech seems steampunk-ish, all vacuum tubes and gears and exposed wiring, but then you get some weirdly advanced shit like the Optacon viewfinders that enabled the blind cultists to see in P1 phosphor green, or the scientists using what appear to be a radar instrument. The film’s willingness to film real children’s real tears feels weird now, something I don’t think filmmakers would do in this day and age. And of course there’s the camerawork, very dynamic, much typically turn-of-the-millennium French in style (as seen in, for example, Jeunet’s other big work, Alien Resurrection, or Vidocq, incidentally directed by longtime Jeunet collaborator Pitof — come to think of it, my perception of French film of 20+ years ago is probably colored by my intense dislike of Alien Resurrection and my frustration with Vidocq.)
There’s also the subtle political critique. While the film isn’t explicit about the evils of capitalism, we can see it in everything — the way the children are exploited by their greedy matron(s), the way even One is exploited by his manager, the way the Cyclops cult performs heinous acts for money. The streets of the city are filled with a post-Great War malaise, as we see nothing of the opulence of Années Folles (or Roaring Twenties) France. (That’s, again, assuming that the film takes place in the 1920s at all, but given how in touch France is with its own history I don’t think it’s too out there to suggest that this film is set in at least an idea of the 1920s.)
Ultimately what The City of Lost Children is about is the way adults and adulthood ruin innocence. When Miette’s gang confronts her about her friendship with One, she points out that One — who speaks in broken French and gets along better with the children than the adults — isn’t all that much of a grown-up, and by the same token, her little criminal friends aren’t all that childlike either. Krank is implied to be but a few years old, but his inability to dream has aged him prematurely; his second-in-command is a sinister dwarf woman who looks like an overgrown baby and may very well be an incomplete creation of the scientist she helped depose. (In the end, she, dying, decides to help Miette.)
I don’t think the movie fully bridges the gap between what it wants to be and what it actually is. Its themes and ideas feel at times half-baked, as if they exist in service of the visuals rather than the other way around. And maybe that’s okay: movies like this are all about their visuals. It’s basically the same kind of thing Terry Gilliam built his career on — a kind of freewheeling clockwork world out of a 90s CD-ROM adventure game that feels hand-painted yet inscrutable, full of non-sequiturs (much like the actual adventure game based on this film!) The themes of this film aren’t the focus, though they’re not quite window-dressing, sitting in this uneasy middle ground that can feel frustrating if you’re here for anything more than just the ride.
Ultimately The City of Lost Children is what it is: a movie that isn’t as weird as the popular consensus would have you believe, but certainly acts like it is. And so the same could be said for a lot of us.
