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Thursday, January 30, 2025

French Film Festival Presents: 'L'Illusionniste'

On Feb. 8, 2012 at 7 p.m. in Wygal Auditorium, the French Film Festival hosted "L'Illusionniste" ("The Illusionist"), the third of five films.

"L'Illusionniste" is based off of a semi-auto biographical script about actor and filmmaker Jacques Tati, written in 1956, reproducing the main character Tatischeff as an animated doppelganger of the original author. Their heavy bodily humor is nearly identical. The figure of a tall, graying, middle-aged man whose legs are tragically too long for his body is hilarious to anyone and yet touchingly emotive.

The film is silent and gestural with spouts of amusing noise out of the characters' mouths that resembles their native language. Conveying this emotion in such a steadily visual way often left the crowd in stitches or wet with tears. Nonetheless, the animation was what Associate Professor of French Dr. Wade Edwards called "beautiful."

The film revolves around an illusionist who is consistently upstaged in his native France and his adoptive London. Discouraged by his meager turnouts and frequent embarrassments, the il lusionist carries his rolled up poster, his ferocious white rabbit and his bag of tricks to Scotland.

The illusionist meets a young girl working at his inn who believes he can perform real magic. They bond immediately, and Tatischeff informally adopts her as his daughter via a pick-pocketed ferry ticket. Landing in Edinburgh, the two lodge in an inn of other performers forgotten in the rag ing, scientific sixties, among them a particularly sad clown. Eventually, after the girl begins to date a young man in Edinburgh and Tatischeff's profes sional life becomes more and more tragic, they part ways, and the film ends.

Observing the film, audience member Paige Reitz said that she thought "L'Illusionniste" was "good" but was surprised it was "mostly silent." This lack of the language Reitz came to hear left her a little disappointed, but she said it was "expressive" and the level of emotions portrayed just through gestures by the characters was a good consolation prize.

Having seen the Film Festival's poster first in Ruffner Hall's Psychology Department, Reitz said she might research the next films before she sees them. However, there was one other thing that amused her due to its tragic-comic result in the real world. This was Tatischeff's release of his white rabbit on a high Scottish hill. Reitz found this inconsistent as "domestic rabbits aren't meant for freedom; it'll get killed by a fox in a day."

Edwards also said the film's director Sylvain Chomet had adapted the script, originally intend ed for live action, into the lush and simultaneously muted color of 2D.

The film also seemed to show a loss of innocence and of magic at its heart, something Edwards commented on with the story of Tati's estranged daughter. Though Tati's daughter Sophie present ed the screenplay to Chomet, there has been some speculation that the original film was inspired by his estranged elder daughter Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel.

After the film, Edwards said, "I'm still trying to understand the end. Did he leave Alice because he was sure she had found her place in the world, or because he needed to move on himself?"