Overall Rating
  Awesome: 61.54%
Worth A Look: 26.92%
Average: 3.85%
Pretty Bad: 3.85%
Total Crap: 3.85%
3 reviews, 34 user ratings
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| Triplets of Belleville, The |
by Elaine Perrone
"Whimsical and brilliantly surreal."
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Almost dialogue-free, Sylvain Chomet's lovely little animated feature Belleville Rendez-Vous (a/k/a The Triplets of Belleville) proves indubitably that a gloriously line-drawn picture is worth a thousand words.Belleville Rendez-Vous opens in a 1930s musical hall in France, with the renown singing and dancing Belleville Triplets, Violette, Rose, and Blanche, performing on stage with Josephine Baker in her trademark bananas, Fred Astaire tapping away in carnivorous shoes, and Django Reinhardt on guitar. It is only when an "Excuse the Interruption" card appears on screen that we realize we are seeing the performance in a 1950s telecast, through the eyes of Champion, a young orphan boy, and his grandmother, Madame Souza.
Madame clearly loves her grandson but seems unable to engage the lonely, overweight, and unhappy boy in any interests. Although she tries, to no avail, to entice him with music, model trains, and a puppy named Bruno, it is only when she spots a picture of his parents on a bicycle and unearths his photo album that she realizes his interest in cycling. Buying him a tricycle, Grandma Souza finds her purpose in life, and Champion finds his joy.
Fast-forward to the 1960s, to a buffed-up but exhausted Champion training for the Tour de France, with Grandma Souza as unrelenting head coach. Meanwhile, a decidedly UN-buffed Bruno spends his time barking at the trains that have encroached on their little home, having had his tail run over in his youth by the model in Champion's bedroom.
For reasons of their own, the French Mafia intrudes on the Tour, kidnapping Champion and two other cyclists, spiriting them away on an ocean liner. On the hunt to recover their Champion, the intrepid Grandma Souza and Bruno follow the liner across the ocean in a paddleboat, landing in Belleville, a wondrous amalgam of Paris, Montreal, and New York populated by a dizzying array of overweight grotesques.
Dispirited and homeless, Madame Souza tries to entertain herself and Bruno by playing percussion on a bicycle wheel, catching the attention of the now wizened but still spry Triplets, who open their home to the pair.
Their apartment crammed with memorabilia from their glory days, the sisters still live joyous lives, dining on their own swamp-caught frogs, watching M. Hulot's Holiday on television, and entertaining themselves and their audiences with a variety of kitchen implements and household appliances as their "instruments," inviting Madame Souza to join them on bicycle rim.
Their joie de vivre spilling over into the hunt for Champion, the quintet devises a delightful rescue scheme fueled by a clue in one of Bruno's black-and-white dreams and featuring a wonderfully inventive use of an orthopedic shoe as a means of dispatch, complete with a rendition of La Marseillaise.Even if you are one who doesn't normally stay through a movie's credits, this time sit still for the extra few minutes for a delightful bonus scene.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8362&reviewer=376
originally posted: 07/24/04 10:26:52
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Edinburgh Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Edinburgh Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Starz Denver Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Starz Denver Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Chicago Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Chicago Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
26-Nov-2003 (PG-13)
DVD: 04-May-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
13-May-2004
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