Review: The Illusionist (2010)

A friend of mine recommended The Illusionist to me a few weeks ago, and I was excited to discover it was based off an unproduced script by Jacques Tati. I watched it last week, and WOW. Whenever people asked me what my favorite animated film was, I never knew how to answer (and I've been told Mary Poppins doesn't count).

Well, now I know what my answer will be in the future. 

A Preface:

I should start by saying that the only Tati film I’ve seen is Mon Oncle, and I’ll confess that I didn’t really enjoy it.

Context is necessary for understanding or appreciating certain films. But there are times when I don’t like being told beforehand how to interpret or critique something. This, I thought, was one of those times. So I went into Mon Oncle completely blind. Clearly, that didn't go well.

Even after that unsuccessful first viewing, I stubbornly refused to read anything about his movies. Everyone has different tastes, and maybe these just weren’t my thing. Maybe I ought to leave them alone.

But Tati’s films are loved by so many, that I couldn’t help but feel I was missing something. So I caved and read a Criterion essay by David Cairns, titled "Jacques Tati: Things Fall Together."

I won’t go into the details, but it seemed like it was written for me. Cairns even started a paragraph with the words “one way not to enjoy Tati’s films is…”, which was exactly how I had watched Mon Oncle, and why I hadn’t enjoyed it!

I haven’t gotten a chance to watch another Tati film since reading that essay, but it has made me excited to do so. In the meantime, I still found Cairns' piece to be immensely helpful in appreciating some elements of The Illusionist that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I’d also like to note that I saw The Illusionist before becoming aware of the story behind the original screenplay. I’d be remiss not to mention that story, but I’d like to talk about that in a separate review.

Finally, there will be spoilers! So before you read this, I highly recommend you watch the film, which is free on Sling TV. English, French, and Gaelic are spoken, but the subtitles only cover the English dialogue—they do not translate the French or Gaelic into English. However, very little dialogue is spoken anyways, so the language barrier shouldn't affect one’s ability to understand the plot.

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The Illusionist, which is directed by Sylvain Chomet, follows a magician who finds that his craft is becoming obsolete. He struggles to get by, performing in any city and in any venue he can. One day, while he is entertaining at a pub in a remote Scottish town, he meets a teenage girl, named Alice, who believes he’s a real magician. The two travel to Edinburgh together, where he begins work at a small theatre.

The boarding house they stay at accommodates other performers whose crafts are also fading into obscurity; including a group of acrobats, a clown, and a ventriloquist. My favorite characters were actually the ventriloquist and his doll. They were both darling (which is rare for those types of characters, especially for the doll)!

I wouldn’t necessarily use the word “adventure” to describe what takes place in Edinburgh. Rather, we see a slice of life; various people and the transitions they make as time goes by. It’s sweet, touching, even humorous—but also very sad. 

A lot of sad movies justify their contents by offering up a sarcastic “well, that’s life!” And I always argue, “I don’t need to be told that life doesn’t always work out. I’ve been able to figure that out on my own!” But there are some movies that—I don’t know how to describe it—just set the right tone. The Illusionist is one of those. The Illusionist wraps you up in a golden sadness and says gently, “That’s how it goes sometimes. Sure, it’s sad. But it can be beautiful, too. That’s life. And you’re not alone in it.”

One of the aspects of Tati’s films that Cairns touches on in his Criterion essay is the kindness he shows in various situations. For example, in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, a child is holding an ice cream cone while she turns a doorknob with the same hand. But the ice cream miraculously stays intact, and Tati even allows us to see the girl enjoying the ice cream a few moments later.

Chomet has used that same idea on a few different scales in The Illusionist, but I’ll give you one of the more poignant examples: After settling in for the night, Alice is dishing up some soup to bring to their fellow tenants in the boarding house. She brings soup to the ventriloquist, and returns to her apartment to dish up some more for the next neighbor.

This next neighbor, the clown, is then seen in his room with a rope around his neck, as he prepares to hang himself. He is lonely. He thinks no one loves him. He’s about to jump—and then, there’s a knock on the door.

Throughout all of this, we hold our breath in anticipation—and yet, somehow, we know before Alice even knocks, that it is not going to end badly. We know she will save him with her gesture of kindness. And indeed, just like the child with her ice cream cone, we get to see the man scraping his bowl clean less than a minute later. However sad the film is, Chomet has still created a world for us that, even in the painful moments, we feel safe in. We know we’re not going to be subjected to some ugly twist.

The animation is beautiful. Each scene is filled with detail, and the way light is depicted streaming over the cities or through the windows made me want to cry. The landscape scenes are especially breathtaking. I found myself admiring those scenes not just for the animation, but for the landscapes themselves, as if they were real landscapes shot with a camera.

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For every positive review I read about The Illusionist, I found another one panning it as nothing more than a lackluster tribute to Tati’s films. What I found interesting about those reviews is that several of them used the term “nostalgic” as though it were a bad word. Not only do I love media that invokes a sense of nostalgia; but it also seems to me that that’s what many of Tati’s films are about in the first place. Is the character of Monsieur Hulot not constantly finding himself at odds with the confusion and pace of the modern world?

I personally adored this film, and I look forward to seeing more of Tati's films in the future. I'm sure once I do, I'll love The Illusionist even more.

If you've seen this film (or if you plan to see it), I’d love to know your thoughts!

'Til next time,

Becca