Do you want to see what I have been up to in school this summer? Here is an essay I wrote for Film Appreciation class taught by Stacy Barton.

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.” —Jean Genet.
To describe City Of Lost Children as dark, sinister or “sick-and-twisted” (Hicks, Deseret News 1996) in the most rudimentary convention is to fly instead of taking a ship, camp in a trailer instead of under the stars or watch a movie when (in some cases) the book proves more insightful. In every visual way possible, this movie is indeed dark. The darkness is not that of formulaic bogeymen and monsters. It is an apocalyptic darkness. Pervading time and underscoring the injustices of violence that average people are quick to utilize with out repercussion, the darkness is barely recognizable as what follows day, which is something that is so easily taken for granted in the here and now. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro created the depth needed to explain, like a book, the story in it’s entirety. Very few movies are capable of rivaling their printed counterparts. Fewer movies can boast that they epitomize reading between the lines, but as some state “[City of Lost Children] …too rarely engages deeper emotions to score much of a bonus”, the “collection of weirdos” and “in-your-face imagery”(Variety Staff, 1995) is too much for some to go looking for them. Perhaps it is what it is and we should have all peed our pants over it and gone home by now. Or perhaps the message, drenched in the romanticism of newfound friends and a happy ending is so much darker than ghoulish antagonists and rusted metal shrouded in fog.

At the fault of my own ‘judging a book by it’s cover’ method of choosing movies, my first viewing of this film, about five years after its release came at the insistence of many artistic friends. I also can thank my husbands love of sci-fi, as I essentially watched it by proxy. At first glance I was impressed by the quality of it’s aesthetic. The engaging look of an apocalyptic city soaked in an almost silent trickle of water was like looking through goggles in the night to an encrusted coral reef, soaking in each color like a massive sponge. Each orange-red and blue-green, a mesmerizing trademark of the Jeunet-Caro partnership, was blinding me to some of the takes that eventually became poignant in the second and third viewings. Maturity may have also shown me the ability to see what I was blind to before. As a child fast food was like a candy dish. Maybe the sun-bleached drive through menus are as now as old as I am, but I only see brown, orange and yellow. Even the salads are an inedible shade of chartreuse. I’ve opened my eyes. Hamburgers are great every now and again, but sometimes I like my movies to be like a copper fillet of baked salmon with a huckleberry sauce deeper than merlot contrasted with an emerald spinach salad topped with julienned carrots and cabbage that makes a plum blush with envy. The recipe of French cinema is more complex, more natural and consequentially more honest. It’s cause and effect montage sequences, unexpected camera jumps and emphasis on normalcy in lieu of ideology play on the conventions of Hollywood and gives City of Lost Children a classic yet complicated visceral patina that is felt through out the film and echoed in the costume and sets.

Continue reading ‘Dreaming is Nursed in Darkness.’