“…someone who didn’t dream but, just the same, lived very well, yet would want to see, in dreams, a greater dimension of the imagination. For us, someone who is deprived of that is condemned to die. That’s part of what we wanted to say… If one cannot dream and imagine things, and if one is sentenced to the everyday, to reality, it’s awful.”–Jean-Pierre Jeunet
DIRECTED BY: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
FEATURING: Ron Perlman, Judith Vittet, Dominique Pinon, Daniel Emilfork
PLOT: A mad genius living on an abandoned oil rig, who is growing prematurely old because he cannot dream, abducts children from a nearby port city and tries to steal their dreams. His minions seize the adopted little brother of One, a foreigner and former sailor who now works in a carnival as a strongman. One teams up with a streetwise orphan girl in the nameless, magical city to track down his little brother’s location.
BACKGROUND:
- This was the second and final collaboration between Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, after the black comedy Delicatessan (1991). Caro focused on the art direction, and Jeunet worked with the actors.
- Caro and Jeunet conceived the idea for the film fourteen years before it was completed.
- This visual effects spectacular, incorporating early CGI technology, was reportedly the most expensive film yet produced in France at that time.
- La cité des enfants perdus was the opening film at the Cannes film festival in 1995 and was in competition for the Palme D’or (losing to Emir Kusturica‘s Underground).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The City of Lost Children is a film that’s built around images: a CGI flea using its proboscis to insert a hypnotic drug into a man’s head, a disembodied brain in a fish tank, and a horde of frightening Santas all compete for honors—not to mention the city itself, a tottering port made up of rambling stairs, arches, balconies and alleys, which resembles Venice re-imagined as a Victorian junkyard. The most iconic image, however, is gaunt old Krank in his gleaming lab hooked up to his dream stealing machine, a multi-tentacled headdress stolen from the laboratory of an avant-garde Dr. Frankenstien.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The City of Lost Children takes place in a magical city that could not exist except in the imagination, in dreams. It’s a fairy tale, but from the first scene—a child’s Christmas Eve dream that turns unsettlingly weird—it’s clear that this is no standard fantasy world that sets out a few simple deviations from our own, but instead a world of childlike wonder where the imagination is unleashed without respect for the possible.
Short theatrical trailer for City of Lost Children
COMMENTS: There’s a scene early on in The City of Lost Children where a dozing Continue reading 29. THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN [La cité des enfants perdus] (1995)