FILM REVIEW: THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE

By Derrick Clements

There’s really only one way to describe “The Triplets of Belleville,” a foreign animated film that was up for Best Animated Feature this year at the Oscars.

It’s very, very … French.

Seeing a foreign film is an opportunity most high school students never take advantage of.  I feel confident in my submission that most readers of this review have never even heard of “Les Triplettes de Belleville.”

Perhaps the film’s lack of popularity comes from the fact that foreign films simply aren’t as advertised by their typically independent distributors.  But just as feasible, it could be that many of them are so unlike American films.

“Belleville” is definitely different than mainstream American film.  The storyline progresses so slowly, it’s hard to tell anything’s happening at all.  But then it gets to the end, and suddenly a definite plotline seems to seem to simply emerge to the viewer.

One way French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet accomplishes this phenomenon is with stunning visuals.  Each character in the film looks unnatural and bizarre.  One of the main characters is a pencil-thin biker with a hugely long nose and even huger leg muscles.  In one slow scene, the character’s grandmother cracks his back and massages him after a long bike ride — using such tools as a vacuum, a mixer, and a lawn mower to complete the service.

Other characters include an extremely fat dog with very skinny legs that are always shaking at the weight, three old lady singers from the days of Fred Astaire who still think they are the Andrew Sisters decades later and a small grandmother with thick glasses and whose right eye always shifts a little until she physically moves it into place.

Just looking at these and many other visual displays can be appealing (and a little peculiar); the real accomplishment here is that they each take on a unique personality, even though none of them speak very much. It is not the words that tell the story.

But it’s not just the visual animation, either.  The music and the assortment of sound effects play a very important role in furthering the plot.

The Academy Award-nominated title song, “Le Belleville Rendez-vous,” is an incredibly catchy French tune — and one that most of the music in the film is based on.

It’s also the song that the Belleville Sisters know best, and they love picking out that catchy tune whenever they can — even if the only instruments they have are a refrigerator, a vacuum, and a crumpled newspaper.

The ornamental, very dream-like animation could not have made such an impact on the viewer without equally ornamental sound effects. Every bizarre motion the eye sees, from the grandmother mowing her grandson’s back to Fred Astair’s shoes coming off and eating him while dancing, is magnified by an equally bizarre sound effect.

This film is best described by conveying the impossibility to describe it. It’s as if Chomet went to sleep on blank sheets of paper, right after eating something very unsettling, and woke up to find the papers filled with the contents of his dreams.

In fact, it’s easy to see much of Chomet’s self — political self — in the film.  When the characters arrive in “Belleville,” a fictitious city with uncanny resemblance to New York, the first thing that can be seen is an extremely obese statue of liberty.  In fact, every American is made to be fat, greedy, fake or any number of the above.

It’s not a kid’s movie.  In one scene, a member of the French mafia bluntly shoots a bicyclist to death for not pedaling fast enough.  In another, an old lady who eats frogs throws a bomb in a lake and catches the frogs that explode out from the lake and drop like Skittles from a rainbow.  There is even some cartoon nudity in the opening scene.

So I find it very difficult to whole-heartedly recommend the film.

But movies like this one don’t come to Stockton very often.  If you don’t catch this foreign film, see another one, or more likely go looking for one.  It’s worth it to see a foreign film like “The Triplets of Belleville” if for no other reason than to take advantage of a cultural experience.

This film has some amazing story-telling abilities. There is subtle beauty in every frame. The characters don’t speak, but their love for one another is so non-romantically drawn in their faces and movement.

But despite all this, it’s safe to say the chances are slim for any “Belleville” lunchboxes or happy meals any time soon.

Maybe some freedom fries, though.