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15.3.04

The Triplets of Belleville, cont.
Contributed by Charles T. Downey at 7:28 PM | Link to this article
I'm not going to give away too much of the plot, but the abandoning cyclists are taken prisoner by the French mafia and transported by ship to a big city called Belleville. In some ways, this place is obviously an American city, with a grotesquely fat Statue of Liberty in its harbor and residents who eat hamburgers and look like they have been lifted directly from a Botero painting (see post on January 8). In his interview, here is what Chomet had to say about it:

The first thing we see of Belleville in the movie is the Château Frontenac in Québec City. We made numerous references to Québec City and Montreal, in trying to imagine how those cities would have looked if they developed in the way New York had. When Québec became independent, money was invested in Toronto instead, which is an English-speaking metropolis. The bridge that appears in the film is the Jacques Cartier Bridge, which is also surrounded by typical Québecois buildings. The Statue of Liberty image is a reference to the American way of life and to the incredible number of obese people you see in American cities. That is something that has always struck me.

In one of the most beautiful sequences in the movie, the grandmother, who has followed Champion throughout the race, chases the boat carrying him to Belleville on a pedalboat, which she rents from a flamboyantly gay man in a cabin on a beach (his mannerisms and the beefcake pinups in his cabin give him away). In one of the funnier jokes in the movie, which made me laugh out loud in the theater (but no one else), is that we learn she has rented a pedalboat when we see the boat owner in front of his cabin, on the front of which reads in huge letters the word "PÉDALOS." This is a pun on the French slang word pédale or p.d., meaning "fag." The music that accompanies the storm-tossed journey of the little pedalboat is the Kyrie movement of Mozart's C Minor Mass, one of the two important themes in the movie. The other is first heard near the film's beginning, when the grandmother and Champion watch a wonderful animation of Glenn Gould playing the C minor prelude from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, a most memorable performance which made the piano sound like a harpsichord. Both of these pieces of music are heard at various points in the movie, often transformed under different guises. This music was much more satisfying than the new songs composed for the movie, with their whimsical performances on household appliances.

The movie's main characters were animated by different teams of artists, and they have incredibly individual looks. The grandmother with her uneven legs wears one huge elevator shoe to even out her pace. The grandson is a caricature of the cyclist's body, all muscle and little else, with an enormous Gallic nose. The Mafiosi have perfectly square shoulders and look like walking blocks of stone. And the hilarious sad sack of a dog, who comes into Champion's life as a puppy and grows into a fat adult dog, howls at the Métro train that passes by the house every five minutes. You should go and see the movie to appreciate this for yourself.

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