Last night, Paul and I finally saw Les Triplettes de Belleville. This quirky story - of Champion, an orphaned boy who becomes a competitive cyclist; his club-footed grandmother, Madame Souza; and the Triplets, three aging jazz singers who befriend her - is by turns sweetly charming, funny and dark. It may also be the most gorgeous, complex and satisfying animated film that I’ve ever seen. (Admittedly, I am not a huge animation buff. If you are, you may have other favorites. Please share.) I could go on and on about Les Triplettes, I could recount the entire plot, I could describe the animation process and the music, and I would still not capture the movie’s full visual, auditory, intellectual and emotional impact. So, in writing my thoughts on a few aspects the film, I’m really not giving away much of great import to those who haven’t seen it.
It’s no coincidence that we watched Les Triplettes during the Tour de France, which we’ve been following for the past week. (In fact, the smattering of Tour-influenced French - and sometime Franglais - that has made its way into our day to day speech is probably the reason that I think of the film’s title in French.) A movie buff friend, knowing our fondness for the Tour, stated that we must see the movie during the race, so Paul moved it to the front of our Netflix queue. Having watched many stages of the Tour, we found the cycling scenes wonderful. While the massive thighs and calves, attenuated upper bodies and pain-filled faces of the animated cyclists were (somewhat) exaggerated, the scenes of the Tour felt remarkably true, although the crowds along the animated route were much better behaved than many a real Tour spectator.
The city of Belleville, an architectural fantasy based on imagery from Montreal, Quebec and New York City, is rendered in a color-washed pen-and-ink drawing style to make an architect swoon. (Would that I could draw like that!) Belleville lives up to her name, though she is a dark beauty, and she was to me as much a character as the humans and animals (notably Mme Souza’s dog Bruno and a number of frogs) that populated her.
And what music! I expect that I’ll be tapping my toes, snapping my fingers, and humming to myself for days to come. Composer Beno�t Charest’s swingy, Django Rheinhardt-inspired score (including the tune - written prior to his involvement with the film - that became the Oscar-winning Belleville Rendez-Vous) incorporates unusual rhythms and “instruments,” including Mouf-Mouf, the name Charest has given his fifties cylindrical vacuum-cleaner, which is played to great effect in one of the Triplets’ musical numbers. Director Sylvain Chomet’s choice of the glorious Kyrie from Mozart’s Mass in C Minor as the soundtrack for Mme Souza and Bruno chasing the ocean liner carrying the kidnapped Champion across the Atlantic in a paddleboat (yes, really!) brings pathos to a scene that might otherwise have read as too funny. Brilliant.
After watching the film, and all of the extras (including wonderful interviews with the director and animators), I was ready to see it again, and would have done, had it not been rather late. We’re not sending Les Triplettes de Belleville back to Netflix until we’ve seen it at least once more, as I’m sure that there’s a lot in this film that I missed in the first viewing.
