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The City of Lost Children Blu-Ray Review
Living In A World Of Their Own
♦ Tripwire gave editor-in-chief Joel Meadows the task of reviewing Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bizarre fantasy adventure The City of Lost Children
The City of Lost Children
Directors: Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Stars: Ron Perlman, Daniel Emilfolk, Judith Vittet, Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus
Delicatessen was a brilliant debut, an imaginative and thought-provoking cinema debut for French filmmakers Caro and Jeunet. Its follow-up The City of Lost Children, released in 1995, is an impressive second movie. Available for the first time on Blu-ray, it displays the sort of bold and dynamic sense of style and ideas that made Delicatessen such a memorable slice of post-apocalyptic fantasy. Daniel Emilfork plays scientist Krank, who kidnaps orphans to steal their dreams in the hope that he can hinder the ageing process. Krank is assisted in his endeavours by a group of cretinous clones, all played by Dominique Pinon (the protagonist in Delicatessen). Ron Perlman is circus strongman One who feels a sense of fillial responsibility for young girl Mitte (Judith Vittet), even though they are not actually blood relatives. The City of Lost Children looks wonderful and even though it doesn’t hold together as well as predecessor Delicatessen, Caro and Jeunet have created a wonderfully rich and vibrant milieu to tell their tall tale in. The pair have been heavily influenced by Terry Gilliam and The City of Lost Children reflects this perhaps even more than Delicatessen did. You can also see the major influence of bande dessinee and artists like Moebius and Enki Bilal on display here too. It feels like a very French film as did its progenitor. The colour palette throughout is very deliberate, using rich yet faded colours. It isn’t quite as perfect a film as its predecessor as its story does collapse a little towards the end but its ambition and visual flair and panache means that you can forgive it its flaws. Perlman looks fantastic but his French sounds a little stilted and artificial. It is a real shame that the pair went their separate ways a few years ago as their two first films showed a wonderfully skewed promise of what could have been. If people enjoyed Delicatessen, they should check this out, now looking the way it should have always done on Blu ray. For fans of idiosyncratic fantasy films, The City of Lost Children is a must-buy.
JOEL MEADOWS
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Jeff Carlisle
April 16, 2016 at 9:29 pm
I will take a tiny bit of umbrage with this review Joel, especially your assessment of Ron Perlman. He does something extraordinary here: he is playing a Russian strongman/ex whaler who speaks very basic French and is trying to take care of a young boy he found on the street–and you get his backstory through the writing, his accent and his costuming by Jean Paul Gaultier. Also, your cause and effect is backwards with Krank the villain. He steals children to get their dreams because he cannot dream himself–which causes him to age much more rapidly than his clone “brothers” played by Pinon, not the other way around.
Not surprisingly, the story uses dream logic and metaphor towards the end, since the entire film feels like a dream. And because of this dream-like structure, every bizarre thing that happens feels internally consistent, similar to the film Dark City that came out a few years later.
When I saw it for the first time 20 years ago, I said that it felt like I had stepped into someone else’s dream. and I still hold to that. It’s what gives the film its power.
This film, Brazil, Blade Runner and Dark City and Inception form a series of films I like to think of as Urban Nightmares and are permanently playing in the back of my mind.