Les Triplettes de Belleville is a quirky, wordless animated feature by writer-director Sylvain Chomet, who has his background in comic art. The joint French-British-Canadian production gained instant acclaim (and broad distribution) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003, and is now available on DVD.
The story follows an aged music teacher, Madame Souza, and her orphaned grandson Champion (and their dog Bruno, whose black-and-white dream sequences are brilliantly absurd!) When Champion is kidnapped, Madame Souza sets out to rescue him, and finds allies in an ancient trio of jazz singers - the Triplets of Belleville. This simple, sweet story unfolds with truly original hand-drawn animation, infectious jazz music and some biting social satire in an unmistakably Gallic flavor.
Some Americans have been offended by some of the caricatures in the film (most centering on the notion that Americans eat rather well!) Cultural sendups abound, but they are mixed in such a polyglot that it can't be called biased, and there are as many jabs at French stereotypes. The fictional city of Belleville draws its visual cues from Paris, New York, Montreal and Quebec; the antagonists in the movie are the French Mafia.
Madame Souza is Portuguese, which may be more obvious to European viewers. I didn't twig to it until I read it in a review. But like the rest of the cultural references, her ethnicity - like her briefly dreadful Fado singing - is only a comical aside. Despite her awkward appearance, she is portrayed with the utmost sympathy; her love and devotion for her grandson are the heart of the story. She weathers her many setbacks with stoic determination and patience, never more emphatically than in her trip across the ocean - also one of the most singularly beautiful scenes in the film, visually.
Despite the fantastically distorted human forms, the animation often has such beautiful qualities of light and motion that you may forget the artifice. Nor do you consciously notice the almost-complete absence of any dialogue; the story is told in complete detail without it. In fact, without the focus on words and mouths moving, the animation is free to tell far more subtle stories; facial expressions, body language and other details of light and motion, all beautifully rendered.
One of the film's most outstanding features is the music; the title song Belleville Rendes-Vous was nominated for an Oscar. The musical thread that runs through the story of Madame Souza and the Triplets is an impossibly catchy mix by composer/musician Benoit Charest. It's a hodgepodge of styles and found instruments (bicycle wheels, refrigerator shelves and a vacuum cleaner) mixed into a gumbo of Franco-American jazz, overlaid with Django Reinhart-style acoustic guitar; toe tapping is unavoidable. (I just ordered the soundtrack!)
