Dark, disgusting humor can come in all shapes and sizes. So ideally, what better way to illustrate a sense of melancholy than with a form that gives you the most freedom of expression: animation. “The Triplets of Belleville” has drawn comparisons from Luis Bunuel and Jacques Tati, but I find this to be not as imaginative as their work, but instead simply gratuitous.
Sylvain Chomet removes the dialogue from his film along with the wit and charm (although many critics have somehow found the film darkly charming). He opens on a trio of 50s singers, the Triplets of Belleville. Their song makes for a swinging anthem to the film, but it’s starkly contrasted with the appearance of a young boy and his grandmother watching the Triplets on TV. The boy is depressed, and the grandmother gets him a dog, then a bicycle, to make him happy.
Years later, the boy is a world-class cyclist in the Tour De France. His grandmother trains him vigorously with an incessant whistle that speaks wonders of emotion but simply drove me mad. She vacuums his calves, cracks his back with a lawnmower and makes him eat a disgusting meal all while their fat and hungry dog barks at every passing train.
Despite all this, he’s not exactly wearing the maillot jaune. As he passes out on a mountain climb, two gangsters who intend to use him in an underground gambling ring kidnap him. The grandmother follows them, and it’s up to her and the now cragged and old Triplets of Belleville to rescue him.
How the plot charts this course is beyond me, and maybe that’s the fun of it, but I missed the part in this 80 minute feature where I was supposed to be amused. Here is a film about depressed people working to achieve impossible goals, and along the way they make life miserable for others.
The grandmother’s pushing for her hopelessly depressed grandson is obvious, but perhaps no one illustrates this more fully than the dog. As a pup, his tail was run over by a toy train, and now he hates them, determined to slowly clamber up the crooked stairs every few minutes to bark at the passing train. The train will not stop, and heaven forbid the window is closed, but sure enough he barks, and at one instance we get a slow motion glimpse inside the train of a passenger spotting and being shocked by the angry dog.
I found no charm in “The Triplets of Belleville” because there is no shred of goodness, beauty or imagination to be found. The animation is certainly unique and inventive, and in all the wordless passages, the images often speak highly artistically. But they are glimpses of despair, grotesquerie or melancholy. The characters that speak wonders to their thoughts and personalities are not imaginative but exaggerations. The gangsters are an obvious example, carrying around a shroud of darkness wherever they go and capable of blending in with one another. But take a waiter that appears in one scene. His long slender body is so hunched from bowing and happily greeting guests that he now stands in a U-shape.
The ending too is a let down, and although it is hardly what you would call a “madcap action scene” in today’s mainstream animated films, it seems to be an extended chase included to write the story out of a corner.
There are images and moments of great recognition throughout “The Triplets of Belleville,” but they will stick with me for the wrong reasons.
2 stars