A French stage magician (voiced by Jean-Claude Donda) arrives in London in 1959, only to find himself performing in near-empty theatres. His style of stage entertainment has begun to fade away, but the Illusionist soldiers on, forced to accept increasingly obscure gigs in fringe theatres, at garden parties and in bars and cafes. On such assignment has him perform at a village pub off the west coast of Scotland, where an act of kindness wins him the admiration of a young woman named Alice (Eilidh Rankin). Alice follows the old illusionist to Edinburgh where she cooks and keeps house while he struggles doing an array of demeaning jobs to support his new surrogate daughter. Then one day, Alice is smitten with the handsome neighbour next door.
For his follow-up to Bellville Rendez-Vous (2001), acclaimed animator Sylvain Chomet resurrected an unproduced screenplay by legendary French mime and filmmaker Jacques Tati. The late comedian supposedly conceived The Illusionist as an act of reconciliation with his estranged daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, whom he had abandoned as a baby, and originally intended to co-star alongside his youngest daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, who personally entrusted the script to Sylvain Chomet prior to her death in 2001. Unfortunately, in bringing this film to the screen, Chomet seems to have stumbled into the middle of the Tati family’s private drama. He was criticised for failing to credit Helga as the inspiration behind the story (although the film is dedicated to Sophie) while other relatives accused him of “attempting to airbrush out our painful family legacy.”
Meanwhile, French critics, never the most receptive towards animation, attacked Chomet for supposedly reducing Tati’s dry comic pathos to simplistic sentimentality. Of course, these critics forgot such Tati treasures as Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) had a similarly rocky reception before being rehabilitated as classics, though The Illusionist was more warmly received on these shores.
The film is certainly not sentimental. On the contrary, Chomet rather bravely goes the downbeat route. In terms of tone, the nearest comparison might be Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight (1951), for The Illusionist is another elegy for a passing era, of frail old age gradually giving away to vibrant, if not always sympathetic youth. Just as the real Tati’s onscreen alter-ego was at odds with the modern world, here nostalgia for the vanished days of musical hall is tainted with a wry contempt for encroaching youth culture. The film opens with the old magician waiting to go onstage after a raucous rock band - all quiffs and teeth, with oddly limp-wristed mannerisms. Crowds of excited girls chase the rockers offstage, leaving our humble illusionist to performs for an audience of two. Subplots concerning a suicidal clown and an alcoholic ventriloquist underline the sad message that this dinosaur’s days are numbered.
Chomet’s animation of the title character is quite remarkable. The illusionist has the same semi-exasperated hunch of Monsieur Hulot. It is as if Tati were alive again. There is charming gag wherein the illusionist stumbles into a cinema screening Mon Oncle, and for one delightful moment the cartoon Tati and the real one gaze baffled at each other. Chomet has a way with non-verbal character interaction quite unlike any animator working in the field today. This fits beautifully with Tati’s poetic pantomime, with dialogue mostly unintelligible and paired down to a minimum. The nuanced mannerisms speak volumes, yet the illusionist himself, while likeable, remains a curiously aloof, often unfathomable protagonist. Maybe he needed Jacques Tati’s warmth to bring him to life after all. Alice’s motivation for adopting this total stranger as a father figure, is similarly unclear and she comes across as unintentionally callous. Their father-daughter relationship still carries a lot of pathos and charm, and individual sequences yield polished nuggets of humour, but the message underlining the increasingly sad series of events remains obtuse. This is a beautiful film but its profound melancholy borders on despair.
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