City of Lost Children

Fairy-tale logic operates in a weird world where children are never safe.

by Cindy Fuchs

Written and directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
A Sony Pictures Classics Release

In the city imagined by filmmakers Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, it's impossible not to feel lost. Wide angles, mobile frames and fantastic visual effects create the sense that in this postmodern (or more precisely, post-Godard-Lynch-and-Gilliam) world, anything can happen: Santa Claus can be cloned, green fog can sneak up inside your nostrils, jacked-up fleas can deliver nasty drug injections.

And yet, for all the carnivalesque goings-on, the film adheres to a certain, fairly strict order, one based in a fairy-tale economy which makes children the primary victims of all things dreadful: kids = innocents are beset by adults = monsters (Hansel and Gretel serves as a particularly harrowing example). But if City of Lost Children lacks something in narrative innovation, it's plainly invested in picking through the mucky ugliness that supports these familiar moral configurations. That is, these children are lost from the jump; their innocence is mythic, a story that unhappy and wishful adults tell themselves.

Rudimentary as it may be, the plot is still hard to lay out in a few sentences, mainly because it's so crowded with characters and borrowed ideas (there's a lot of homaging going on here, but it seems to be thematic: nothing new under this sunless sky). The gist of it is that the kids are endangered by any number of bad or ineffectual adults. Initially we see some worried parents and missing-children flyers plastered on alley walls, but these quickly fade into the background, upstaged by the bizarre villains (who, it may go without saying, act more like children than the kids do).

One (or two) of these miscreants is "the Octopus'' (played by Genevieve Brunet and Odille Mallet), a pair of female Siamese twins who run a Dickensian urchin squad where runaway or kidnapped children are forced to steal sundry valuables (some stagy jewelry, some bundles of cash). While the twins' pathological union is played for comedy (their four hands are repeatedly shown working in tandem, gathering loot or chopping vegetables for stir-fry; one draws on a cigarette and the other exhales), they also quite literally incarnate a consuming self-interest, always shrouded in darkness, unable to connect to anyone but themselves/each other."

Clearly opposed to such monstrous self-absorption is the children's would-be savior, a simple- and single-minded carnival strongman named One (Ron Perlman). He becomes involved when his younger brother, Denree (Joseph Lucien), is stolen by a gang known as "the Cyclops," guys who stomp around the streets like stormtroopers and wear electronic eyepieces like the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Apparently the Cyclops are blind, as they circulate propaganda that encourages everyone to "Renounce the Gift of Sight," but their gadgety eyepieces allow them (and us, on occasion) to see through a green-tinted, robovision lens.

The Cyclops' blindness has an ostensibly evolutionary corollary: they possess hearing so acute that they suffer horrible pain when anyone makes an unexpectedly loud noise nearby. Like many of the well-executed effects in this film, the reason for their macabre green-perspective or extraordinary audio isn't exactly clear, except that these details establish the Cyclops as a bunch of sensory misfits who are easily victimized by other characters whose corruption is more sophisticated, or at least more focused.

The Cyclops are indentured to deliver the children to a mean, Mr. Burnsish old man called Krank (Daniel Emilfork), who straps the tykes into chairs and wires their heads so he can forcibly download their dreams, thinking to absorb their purity. (The irony is that this pursuit has been largely in vain, because all the kids have nightmares, not dreams.) Krank's gothic residence looks like an offshore rig, erected on stilts amid water and fog just outside the city; the image draws from all kinds of funky precursors, from Frankenstein to the Addams Family to Burton's Batman. (Generally speaking, Jean Rabasse's sets draw from any number of Blade Runner derivations; they're damp, murky, artfully confusing.)

Krank shares his home with some of his previous botched attempts at reconstructed humanity, including a midget mother- figure (Mireille Mosse), a group of six brother-clones (all played by Dominique Pinon), and a brain in a fishtank (voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant). The brain, reminiscent of Ice-T's dolphin friend in Johnny Mnemonic, is named Irvin; he suffers from migraines and tends to interrupt the action with commentary designed to exasperate Krank (at one point the frustrated old man shuts Irvin down, his face pressed up against the point-of-view lens we're looking from, so that we become the tanked object of his terrific hissing: "Sssiiilence leguume!" ["Shut up, vegetable!"]).

In order to rescue Denree from this fate worse than death, One joins forces with an orphan named Miette (Judith Vittet). Lucky for One, Miette is resourceful and clever, certainly smarter than he is, who functions as well-intentioned muscle here. It's clear that One needs some looking after. Street-savvy Miette is interested in him because she's looking for a family connection (as orphans in fairy tales are always looking for family connections).

Vittet — like all of the film's child actors — gives an impressively mature performance, aided by careful lighting and framing. This stands in some contrast to Perlman, best known in the States as the chaste Beast opposite Linda Hamilton's Beauty on TV. His role in City calls for him to speak in pidgin French, wear a midriff Jean-Paul Gaultier sweater, and look bewildered. (He does fine.)

Miette and One's relationship drives the film, to the extent that it's driven anywhere. They share a minimal but clear erotic attraction: One tells Miette that she can be his sister, and they cuddle up together under a burlap sack. It's more amiable than deviant. Then again, given the normality of deviance in this film, it's hard to know what that might mean: when One is injected with some demon flea-juice (administered by the Octopus, it's a long story), he turns on Miette. His assault is pretty brutal, and she has no recourse. Even when he returns to himself (due to some nifty plot-rigging), it seems likely that her nightmare will go on.