City of Lost Children

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995)

When people use the term "comic book movie", they usually mean a simple movie with flat characters, flashy sets and a lot of action. This is based on people's experience of the American mainstream comic book. Expand the field a little to include Europe and the classic newspaper comic strips, and you can see why I would call City of Lost Children a comic book movie: it's a subtle movie with flat characters, flashy sets and lots of action, "Metal Hurlant" meets Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs, Moebius meets E.C. Segar. I've seen City compared to Brazil, but the black wrought iron and sickly green have actually been cribbed from David Lynch's Dune. Unlike Lynch, however, Jeunot and Caro are able to frame their shots well and keep the action moving so it never gets remotely close to Dune's stiffness.

The movie concerns a strongman's attempts to recover his kidnapped little brother in a strange city where everyone is unhappy. The strongman, known as One, hooks up with a tough little girl (she and her friends are robbing an office when she decides to help him). Some critics have called this movie Spiebergian and sentimental, I guess because it has kids in it. But these kids are neither cute nor bathetic. The hard times have made them tough, self- interested, competent. In fact, I think the title of the film refers to all the adults in the picture, who are all obsessed and depressed, either helpless or comically threatening. Far from being sentimental, the film is almost too chilly for its own good, although it picks up warmth as the enjoybably convoluted story goes on. As it does, it moves closer and closer to that strange nirvana known as pure cinema where, like the comic stories and comic books at their best, wit, dexterity and imagination allow flat icons to be adopted as rich characters by the viewer. City of Lost Children wins my award for the best pieces of pure cinema of 1995.

More about this movie