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Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Magnificent Life' Review: Sylvain Chomet's Beautifully Animated but Clumsily Scripted Love Letter to Marcel Pagnol
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. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Peak Everything' Review: Piper Perabo Headlines a Cute Canadian Rom-Com Imbued With Very Timely Anxieties Rebel Wilson Responds to Latest 'The Deb' Controversy as Legal Dispute Leaves Film in Limbo 'My Father's Shadow' Review: First-Ever Nigerian Film at Cannes Is an Elegant and Stirring Ode to Lagos '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. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Time Out
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
A Magnificent Life
No one who's fallen for the timeless and charmingly antic worlds of Sylvain Chomet will be disappointed by this poignant eulogy to one of France's great, if now decidedly uncool 20th century artists. Here, the French animator swaps the escapist fantasias of The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Illusionis t (2010) for a biopic that, while more conventional, still holds wonders of its own in its depiction of an extraordinary career and 60-odd eventful years of French history. The life in question belongs to inventor, teacher, playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol (voiced by Laurent Lafitte). Best know outside the Republic as the author of Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources, but a fixture on school syllabuses in his homeland, he's introduced receiving a smattering of applause in a sparsely attended Parisian theatre in 1956. Well-meaning friends note that soaring petrol prices caused by the Suez crisis are keeping people at home. Pagnol, though, knows his star is waned. 'The young will sweep us under the carpet,' he later laments at a soirée at his home, a grand Parisian pile taking on the air of a mausoleum. An artist confronted by his own obsolescence, Pagnol is reluctantly forced into one final act of creation: a memoir that's to be serialised by Elle magazine. Flashbacks to the eventful chapters he jots down make up the meat of the film. It's a framing device you've seen a hundred times before, but Chomet freshens it up by introducing the younger Pagnol as a guide to his own journey from the dry hills of Marseille to the bright lights of Paris's pre-war arts scene, via his 1931 breakout talkie Marius and run-ins with the Nazi film industry during the Occupation. Chomet is a kind of earthbound French cousin to Hayao Miyazaki At 61, the same age as Pagnol as he sits down to write his memoir, Chomet clearly has his mind on legacy too; questions of which art endures and which doesn't haunt the story. The fickleness of time, too, as the exuberant, rough-and-tumble Pagnol gradually becomes more owlish and introspective, haunted by the need for his father's approval and victim of a lifetime of snobbery from Parisians looking down on his provincial origins. (The English dubbed version swaps out the Marseille accent for a cockney one.) Chomet's handmade-style animations, filled with larger-than-life characters with an affectionate touch of caricature, locate him as a kind of earthbound French cousin to Hayao Miyazaki. The comparison is lofty but fair – and not because both animators have their own couch gag on The Simpsons. Chomet shares his Japanese peer's generosity, humanism and knack for illuminating the everyday with a sense of wonderment. All three are present in this warm-hearted hymn to another unique Gallic artist.
