Psycho's Movie Reviews #210: The City Of Lost Children (1995)

The City of Lost Children (French: La Cité des enfants perdus) is a 1995 science fantasy film directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, written by Jeunet and Gilles Adrien, and starring Ron Perlman. An international co-production of companies from France, Germany, and Spain, the film is stylistically related to the previous and subsequent Jeunet films, Delicatessen and Amélie.

The musical score was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, with costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. It was entered into the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot

Krank (Daniel Emilfork), a highly intelligent but malicious being created by a vanished scientist, is unable to dream, which causes him to age prematurely. At his lair on an abandoned oil rig (which he shares with the scientist's other creations: six childish clones, a dwarf named Martha, and a brain in a vat named Irvin) he uses a dream-extracting machine to steal dreams from children. The children are kidnapped for him from a nearby port city by a cyborg cult called the Cyclops, who in exchange he supplies with mechanical eyes and ears. Among the kidnapped is Denree (Joseph Lucien), the adopted little brother of carnival strongman One (Ron Perlman).

After the carnival manager is stabbed by a mugger, One is hired by a criminal gang of orphans (run by a pair of Conjoined twins called "the Octopus") to help them steal a safe. The theft is successful, but the safe is lost in the harbour when One is distracted by seeing Denree's kidnappers. He, together with one of the orphans, a little girl called Miette (Judith Vittet), follows the Cyclops and infiltrates their headquarters, but they are captured and sentenced to execution. Meanwhile, the Octopus orders circus performer Marcello (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) to return One to them. He uses his trained fleas, which inject a poison capsule that causes mindless aggression, to turn the Cyclops guards against each other. While Marcello is rescuing One, Miette falls into the harbour and sinks, seemingly drowned, but an amnesiac diver living beneath the harbour rescues her.

Miette leaves the diver's lair to find One and Marcello both drowning their sorrows in a bar. Upon seeing Miette alive the remorseful Marcello lets One leave with her. However the Octopus confronts them on the pier, and uses Marcello's stolen fleas to turn One against Miette. A spectacular chain of events triggered by one of Miette's tears leads to a ship crashing into the pier before One can throttle her. Marcello arrives and sets the fleas on the Octopus, allowing One and Miette to escape to continue searching for Denree.

Back at Krank's oil rig, Irvin tricks one of the clones into releasing a plea for help in the form of a bottled dream telling the story of what is going on on the oil rig. It reaches One, Miette, and the diver, and the latter remembers that he was the scientist who made them, and that the oil rig was his laboratory before Krank and Martha attacked him and pushed him off it to take it for themselves, leaving him for dead in the water. They all converge on the rig; the diver to destroy it and the duo to rescue Denree.

Miette is almost killed by Martha, but the diver harpoons her. She then finds Denree asleep in Krank's dream-extracting machine, and Irvin tells her that to release him she must use the machine to enter the dream herself. In the dream world, she meets Krank and makes a deal with him to replace the boy as the source of the dream; Krank fears a trap but plays along, believing himself to be in control. Miette then uses her imagination to control the dream and turn it into an infinite loop, destroying Krank's mind. One and Miette rescue all the children, while the now-deranged diver loads the rig with dynamite and straps himself to one of its legs. The diver regains his senses as everyone is rowing away and pleads with his remaining creations to come back to rescue him, but a seabird lands on the handle of the blasting machine, blowing up him and the rig.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The film holds a 79% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 56 reviews, with an average rating of 6.91/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Not all of its many intriguing ideas are developed, but The City of Lost Children is an engrossing, disturbing, profoundly memorable experience." It also holds a weighted average score of 73 on Metacritic, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews". Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of a possible 4, writing that the film's design and visual effects deserved the highest possible praise but the story was sometimes confusing: "I would be lying if I said I understood the plot."

According to authors Jen Webb and Tony Schirato, the dual nature of capitalism constitutes a main source of tension in the film: On the one hand, capitalism is presented as enabling self-interest and freedom, as exemplified by the freedom to produce scientific developments (Krank), pursue religious ideas (the Cyclopses), and seek wealth (the Octopus). On the other hand, it exposes the deplorable effects of capitalism the exploitation of childhood (the cynical orphans), of tenderness (the Original scientist, attacked and turned out by his own beloved creations), and of innocence (the terrified children whose dreams are stolen) while suggesting that there is no place in capitalism for originality, disinterestedness, duty, self-reflective analysis, and other defining aspects of "the human."

According to author Donna Wilkerson-Barker, these elusive aspects of humanity are presented within the film for various characters to identify with. For example, the relationship between One and Denrée represents, for Miette, a family of authenticity. Prepared to sacrifice her life in order to become a part of their family, Miette helps One to save Denrée from Krank's manipulative environment. In another example, Irvin the brain plays his part in overturning the same environment in order to liberate his "family" of clones. In the end, two boats filled with these two different families row towards their futures: In one boat, a technologically produced family of Irvin and the clones; In the other, a rationally envisioned family containing Miette, One, and the abducted children. This leaves the audience to question precisely what the future will hold for these two differing visions of humanity.

As The City of Lost Children "proceeds in full awareness that the past to which it is committed never really existed", the film has been classified as an example of the steampunk genre.

Budget $18 million

Box office $1.7 million

My Review

Caro and Jeunet had a fairly long collaboration that produced a good many shorts and only two features: this and Delicatessen. For The City of Lost Children, one is brought into a netherworld, a place of dark fantasy where a scientist keeps children's dreams to keep him from growing old and dying while a strongman (Ron Perlman) and little girl try to stop him and get the children back. This is the one line summary that can barely do justice to the sheer visual prowess that this film provokes. One has to think back to Terry Gilliam, and later on to Guillermo Del-Toro, as a basis of comparison for an eye for a world that is entirely there's but very much recognizable. You actually can't easily compare a lot of what is in it, since its look (mostly from Marc Caro, who focused on art direction while Jeunet did the actual direction of scenes) is derived from sources without having to be specifically homage.

It's as original as 1990's dark fairy-tale/fantasy can get, and for the select viewer there's few pleasures/terrors like it. I say both pleasures and terrors since that is the ultimate goal here, and while the word may be repeated most amongst critics (alongside, perhaps, 'existential') there's no other way to describe it in a word: it's surreal. But this I mean in a sense that would've tingled Salvador Dali, or tickled distinctive science fiction authors like Frank Herbert. City of Lost Children is a world where a city is baroque and full of browns hues and dark corners, black and greys, the sick greens of the eye that the aliens look through, and the production design suggests a world that may have never happened or may happen years from now.

And the choices of lenses and the direction of particular shots and the rhythm are creative too, always very interesting in the means of experimentation. Some moments, like that tear that the child Miette sheds that flies across streets and sets off a chain reaction starting with a spider web and ending with a ship crashing through a dock, is no less than stunning in its timing and weird crescendo. Other things, like with Krank (exceptional and underrated Daniel Emifork) and his scenes where he is made to cry by being reminded of his present state of predicament, or when he does that extremely creepy scene as Santa Claus singing to a record player to a bunch of wailing babies, are given that look through a warped perspective, of that oval-shaped look where things jut out or look bigger than they actually are- in this case Emifork's face. This isn't the only area Caro and Jeunet practice their unique outlook with the cinematography (Darius Khondji deserves a lot of credit as well), but it's most prominent and memorable.

The City of Lost Children has a remarkable take on a story that could be a possible companion piece to Pan's Labyrinth - not because it has the same reality-meets-fantasy angle, but because they're films that inspire the dark and beautiful, the most sinister in human beings manifested into things that shouldn't be seen, and aren't simply for kids. We're engrossed in both of the stories in this film, of this daring, sometimes very amusing quest of One and Miette, and the struggle to maintain sanity and a sense of what existence can be amongst the six clones and the dwarf Mademoiselle Bismuth, because it's a world we've never seen before, even if we think or even know we have.

And so many things that will stay with you, scenes and the language of the cinematic technique: the opening scene with the old man's dream of Santa coming down the chimney to deliver presents only to become twenty Santas in the room; the green smoke that travels all along the city that invades peoples dream-state and gives the vision to a mysterious woman; those wicked witch-twins who play music as a flea intoxicates one to kill the person standing right beside; the death scene of the Mademoiselle, which shouldn't be so sad but is if only for her mentioning of her allergic reaction to steel; and that bearded, cackling man tied with dynamite to the legs of the castle above the water. This is such a rich experience that it will take a few more viewings to let it all seep in, but for the first time it's simply fantastic imagination of an order that suggests freedom rarely seen in the weird-and-wild cult world of cinema.

This film is an utter delight with a surreal look and a cast of grotesque characters together with an enjoyable story. The world in which this is set has a distinct yellow/green look and none of the adult characters are exactly attractive in the Hollywood sense, this is helped by the way they are filmed. The villains are over-the-top strange making them more comic than scary. The story is enjoyably weird with plenty of tense moments, again these are done in a way that isn't overly frightening. The cast does an impressive job making their unbelievable characters believable; most notable are Ron Perlman, who plays One and young Judith Vittet who is a delight as Miette. Overall I'd definitely recommend this to anybody looking for something very different. 10/10

{Btw, these comments are based on watching the film in French with English subtitles}