Attila Marcel

After The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet stepped outside animation for the first time without changing much about his language. Guillaume Gouix plays Paul, thirty-three years old, silent, living with two aunts determined to make a concert pianist of him. He does not speak because of something that happened in childhood which nobody will describe to him. When his neighbour Madame Proust and her herbal concoctions come into it, Paul descends into his own past and the film opens out into musical reveries. The naming joke is unhidden: Proust, and the madeleine. Chomet wrote the music himself and used almost no dialogue, and he makes no secret of his sources either, with Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati present in nearly every gesture. The result is live action assembled by the logic of animation. The sets are too tidy, the movement too choreographed, the feeling too legible. That is exactly what makes it enchanting to some viewers and artificial to others. It screened at Toronto in 2013. Who it is for: those who love Chomet's visual world and humour carried by music rather than words. Who it is not for: viewers wanting realistic psychology or narrative momentum.