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5 items from 2010

21 August 2010 4:06 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

In homage to Jacques Tati, French animator Sylvain Chomet has crafted an exquisite, gently comic and elegiac film

Seven years ago, French animator Sylvain Chomet made a pleasing intervention into the world of bland, airbrushed, computer-animated American movies with his delightful Belleville Rendezvous (aka Les Triplettes de Belleville). A crucial element in his wildly inventive film was the Tour de France, and Chomet wanted to include a clip featuring the cycling postman from his great hero Jacques Tati's Jour de fête. He wrote to the director's daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, seeking permission, and she was so impressed she not only gave him the go-ahead but also drew his attention to an unfilmed screenplay her father had written in the late 1950s. Filed in the archives as "Film Tati No 4", it was dedicated to her. Tati had abandoned what has now become The Illusionist as being too serious and personal, embarking instead on the extravagant Playtime, »

- Philip French

16 June 2010 7:48 AM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Alors. The opening gala film at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Illusionist is an animated film by Sylvain Chomet, who made The Triplets of Belleville, based on an unfilmed script or treatment or scriptment by Jacques Tati. So, rather like the Kubrick-Spielberg hybrid A.I. Artificial Intelligence, it's tempting to treat it as an artifact whose uncertain authorship is its most interesting feature. But as with the fascinating blurring of two very different sensibilities seen in the earlier science fiction fairy tale, to get too caught up in that question may result in paying insufficient attention to the object itself.

Certainly Chomet's view of the world is closer to Tati's than Spielberg's to Kubrick's. His first feature paid respectful homage to Jour de fête(and being a French visual comedy with a bicycle in a central role, how could it not?) which brought Chomet to the attention of Sophie Tatischeff, »

10 June 2010 1:59 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

After the success of Belleville Rendez-Vous, French animator Sylvain Chomet had much of Hollywood making overtures at him. So what made him decamp to Edinburgh instead?

"Scotland is very like Provence," Sylvain Chomet declares, and waits a second for the ridiculousness of what he has just said to sink in. Who wouldn't be fooled by the lavender fields of Lanarkshire, the sun-bleached hills of Kirkcaldy or the olive groves of Auchtermuchty?

Isn't Govan even a kind of Monte Carlo by the Clyde with scratchcards for roulette and Buckfast for Bordeaux? And what is a midge, if not a cicada that has yet to find its voice?

"No, no, I am serious," Chomet insists, half in outrage. "Laugh if you like, but they are very similar. The light is exactly the same as in Provence. That is, when there is light in Scotland. And I am telling you, you only get »

- Fiachra Gibbons

30 January 2010 4:06 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Grandson of Hulot star accuses film-makers of sabotaging script of new animated movie

An unfilmed Jacques Tati screenplay, L'illusionniste, will finally make it to the screen after 54 years, when director Sylvain Chomet's animated version has its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Berlinale, next month. But the occasion threatens to be overshadowed by a story of pain and scandal from the real life of the French comedian.

Chomet's treatment of Tati's poignant tale has been much awaited since his award-winning 2003 animation, ­Belleville Rendez-Vous. L'illusionniste tells of an old-fashioned, ageing magician whose encounter with a young girl changes his life, in a narrative believed to have been written by Tati as a personal message to his teenage daughter.

In 2000, the screenplay was handed over to Chomet by Tati's daughter, Sophie, two years before her death. Now, however, the family of Tati's illegitimate and estranged eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who »

- Vanessa Thorpe

19 January 2010 11:36 AM, PST | Twitch | See recent Twitch news »

It seems that every 10-15 years Jacques Tati is reintroduced to the American moviegoing public. The last wave was in the late '90s when the recently-restored color print of Jour de Fête (1949)--Tati's first directorial feature--traveled the art house circuit. Now with the participation of the French ministry, spanking new prints have been struck of Tati's films and a new wave is hitting American shores. Riding the crest of this most recent wave is The Magnificent Tati, an outstanding documentary biography by Michael House, which will see its U.S. premiere in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Sunday, January 24, 2010, 2:00Pm, with House in the house.

Along with Dennis Harvey's helpful overview of Tati's career, SF360 has optioned my interview with Michael House, which is now up at their site. As synopsized at SF360, Michael House was born in San Diego and worked »

5 items from 2010