‘A Magnificent Life' Review: Sylvain Chomet's Beautifully Animated but Clumsily Scripted Love Letter to Marcel Pagnol

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21-05-2025

A Magnificent Life (Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol), a biopic of French playwright-filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, clearly represents a labor of love for writer-director Sylvain Chomet. His first animated feature since 2010's The Illusionist, it features the gorgeous style first showcased in 2003's award-winning The Triplets of Belleville. If its storytelling proves more rudimentary, hewing closely to the stylistic formula endemic to the genre, the ample visual pleasures prove their own reward. Premiering at Cannes, the film should find appreciative audiences in its native France, where its subject is best known.
The story, told in flashback, begins in 1956 Paris, where the 61-year-old Pagnol (voiced by Matthew Gravelle in the English-language version) is despairing that his work has gone out of fashion. Although he intends to give up writing to pursue his hobby of inventing (he's working on a perpetual-motion machine), he's asked by a magazine editor to pen a memoir.
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'Memoir? You'd need a memory for that,' a dubious Pagnol responds.
Nonetheless, aided by his younger self, who magically appears to jog his recollections, Pagnol begins to recount his life, starting with his early years in Marseille and the death of his mother when he was still a teenager. He moves to Paris as a young man to pursue a career as a playwright, the decision amusingly signaled by a promotional travel video for the City of Lights ('a mere 15 hours from Marseille' by train, it promises).
Although his early efforts are flops, he eventually finds success with such plays as Jazz and Topaze, the latter resulting in his disapproving father finally accepting his career choice. He hearkens back to his native city with another hit, Marius, which becomes the first of his works to be adapted for the screen.
Pagnol initially resists the idea of making movies, which Chomet cleverly dramatizes in the form of a mock silent film. But the advent of talkies, and a trip to London where he's enthralled by a screening of The Broadway Melody, convince him otherwise. Soon he's rhapsodizing about the stylistic freedom afforded by cinema, in another superbly designed sequence that illustrates those visual devices.
More pictures follow, including such hits as 1932's Fanny, with clips from several of them woven into the animated proceedings. A Magnificent Life also delves deeply into Pagnol's patriotism and love of French cinema, illustrating such episodes as his refusal to work for the Nazis during the German occupation and his later advocacy for taxing American films to prevent them from dominating local culture.
Pagnol's personal life is explored as well, including his marriage to actress Jacqueline Bouvier, for whom he wrote Manon of the Spring, and the tragic death of their young daughter. He's also shown mourning the death of his close friend Raimu, who starred in several of his works.
Chomet's screenplay doesn't fully succeed in its blend of surreal whimsy, such as talking animals, and detailed depiction of its subject's life and career. There are times when A Magnificent Life gets too heavily into the weeds, attempting to cover so many biographical bases that it loses narrative momentum. But the stylistic imagination and beautiful, hand-drawn animation on display more than make up for its awkward storytelling, and it ultimately emerges as a loving tribute to an important figure in French culture.
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