by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s film at the San Diego Public Library was a
sometimes engaging, sometimes frustrating movie called The Triplets of
Belleville. It was presented as part of a
celebration of “National Bike Month” (did you know May was National Bike Month?
Me neither) and the two other Monday night movies at the library are also going
to be bicycle-themed: the 1979 film Breaking Away (which I remember seeing on TV shortly after its
theatrical release) and a 2012 film called Premium Rush which sounds like the sort of thing you’ve seen
before even if you haven’t: “In Manhattan, a bike messenger picks up an
envelope that attracts the interest of a dirty cop, who pursues the cyclist
throughout the city.” The official synopsis of The Triplets of
Belleville promised a much better movie
than the one we got: “When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France,
Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters —
an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire — to rescue him.” The
leaflet also told us that the film was animated, which should have been a
warning sign.
Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, The Triplets of
Belleville actually starts with its most
entertaining sequence, a black-and-white cartoon supposedly from the heyday of
the Triplets of Belleville, a vocal group pretty obviously modeled on the
marvelous Boswell Sisters, who from 1930 to 1936 made a series of records with
advanced jazz harmonies and an infectious rhythmic feel (music critic Scott
Yanow rates them as far better than the Andrews Sisters, who came later but sound more primitive, and I think he’s right). The
film-within-the-film shows the Triplets (drawn as unusually tall; the film’s
imdb.com page quotes Chomet as telling the animators to make them look like
basketball players) doing their big hit song, “Belleville Rendezvous,” with a
backing band that sounds like the original Quintet of the Hot Club of France
with Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Indeed, we get a scene of the
band’s guitarist taking a solo, and he’s made to look like Django, and there’s
a weird in-joke in which “Django” takes off his left shoe and frets his guitar
with the toes of his left foot. (This is a reference to the real Django
Reinhardt having had an accident in the late 1920’s in which his left hand was
badly burned; as a result, three of its fingers were partially paralyzed, and
though they weren’t totally
useless for playing — he could still use them to make bar chords — he developed
a style based on quick single-note runs instead of strummed chords that became
enormously influential on later jazz guitarists.) They’re also shown as part of
a floor show that features caricatures of the great African-American singer and
dancer Josephine Baker (she fled to France in the late 1920’s to avoid American
racism and became a huge star there) — she wears the real Baker’s famous skirt
of bananas and anxiously runs off stage as the other performers seize her
bananas and threaten to expose her — and Fred Astaire, whose tap shoes detach
themselves from his feet and start eating him.
Then the film cuts to a later
time period, established in a newspaper headline one of the imdb.com “Trivia”
posters noticed as 1963, and the cartoon we’ve just seen is established as a
film-within-the-film being watched by Madame Souza along with a showing of
Jacques Tati’s film Jour de Fête.
From there the film devolves into a virtually dialogue-less chase scene as
Madame Souza and the Triplets of Belleville join forces to rescue her grandson,
who apparently (I did a lot of nodding off during the film and even the parts I
stayed awake for didn’t make much sense) was not only kidnapped in the middle
of the Tour de France but taken on an ocean liner to New York City, while a
group of three bicyclists ride in front of a process screen and bookies take
bets on the outcome of the race as it’s still going on. The Triplets
of Belleville has some great visual gags,
including one in which the title characters plant a bomb in the middle of the
ocean and, as it blows up, great quantities of marine life come billowing out.
At first we assume they’re fish but they turn out to be frogs, which means that
Madame Souza and the Triplets are pretty much living on frog’s legs for most of
the rest of the movie (and of course the frog’s legs do a certain amount of
twitching on their way into the characters’ mouths — this is not a good “date movie” if you’re dating a vegan).
There’s also a dream sequence in which a pretty obvious caricature of Buster
Keaton is riding a locomotive with a cannon mounted on it (a reference to his
famous scene with the cannon on board his train in The General), only the track the “train” is on is actually the
rim of Bruno the dog’s food bowl, and a great sequence in which one of those
odd French cars of the period with a long hood and a small interior gets caught
on a hill during one of the chase sequences, stands up like a bowling pin and
then tumbles end-over-end back down the hill.
But overall The
Triplets of Belleville seems too much like
one of those aggravating stories in which, because it’s a fantasy and therefore
anything can happen, it does, whether or not it makes any sense to the overall
narrative. It also has a common failing among animated films of being too cute
and clever for its own good, and though as animators the filmmakers could have
used all the colors of the rainbow, they shoehorned most of it into the dirty
browns and greens that seem to be the default colors today’s filmmakers use for
everything. On the plus side is
that the film has very little dialogue — which makes it more confusing but also
more pure as an audio-visual diet (one suspects the Jacques Tati references
were deliberate tributes from writer-director Chomet since Tati’s films were
also famous for their sparing use of dialogue) — and the animation is
excellent, with figures not only moving fluidly and with grace but actually
casting shadows (an effect Walt Disney used in the early days but he later
abandoned, and most other animators didn’t even try, because if you have a cartoon character casting a
shadow, you have to animate not only the character but also the shadow). I
guess I would have wanted The Triplets of Belleville to be more fun — as it stands it’s a bit too “arch” for its own good, a bit (more
than a bit, actually) too much in love with its own cleverness and working too
hard at being charming.
