The Triplets of Belleville

Directed and Written by Sylvain Chomet

Language: French with some English, no subtitles

Starring the voices of Michèle Caucheteux, Jean-Claude Donda, Michel Robin and Monica Viegas

MPAA: Rated PG-13 for images involving sensuality, violence and crude humor.

80 minutes run time

What a delightful romp through the sub-conscious is this French anime’ film by Sylvain Chomet.  At $10 for 80 minutes, probably one of the more expensive films on Houston Street, but the message is short and sweet, as long as you don’t too caught up in trying to figure it out.

“Triplets” takes Hayao Miyazaki’s academy-award winning “Spirited Away” one step further by combining animation and adult themes with a plot that is almost entirely suggested, rather than acted.  Like “Away,” the movie immediately spirits the audience away into a world of make-believe, serving notice that nothing can be taken for granted.  The first ten minutes are so intense that the audience is reeling, on the ropes..  It’s a one-two shot to the senses.  The first shot is to open to the irrational, and the next is to make everyone pay attention.

The movie is delivered through moving images and sounds.  Spoken lines that make sense are, essentially,  non-existent.  Although the spoken lines are nonsense, they are delivered with the perfect intonations: exactly the rhythm and dynamics you would expect.  The message is that the movie is about feelings.  Once you experience the feeling, what difference do the words make?  Better to substitute nonsense so you get a second message along with the first: don’t try and get rational with me or you’ll be sorry.  This movie is about your dreams, viewer, and you’re just beating your head against a wall if you try to put it into words.

Oh yes, the plots!  The main one is about a woman who raises her grand-son to be a champion bicyclist and then follows his trail after he is kidnapped.  So far, so good; could be the plot for any movie (and is, with some variations, the plot for many movies).  Good guys and bad guys.  The young man is an orphan who lost his parents when he was very young.  We don’t know why, but in the course of movie the cause is revealed as a spectrum of possibilities.  After all, you don’t care which one of the dozen or so possible reasons for the parents’ disappearance the writer might chose, do you?  Choose your own cause of death--car, plane, shark, holocaust, or whatever.  All you care about is the emotion that is created.  So, Chomet skips the variations and goes straight to the feeling.  It’s his way of saying, “You know the rest.”

The man grows into a champion bicyclist in France, where bicycling is king.  Trained athletes have died on the Tour and other races like it.  They die in their pedals.  Some have died crossing the finish line.  The pain of life is etched on the faces of the bicyclists in Chomet’s work.  They snarl in rage at the life they have made for themselves, the torture they have chosen to win their place in society.  The grandmother doesn’t snarl.  She doesn’t even talk.  Not one word the entire movie.  The only thing she does with her mouth is to convey her worry about her son’s disappearance by increasing the frequency of the chirps from the whistle in her mouth.  It isn’t necessary to show her weeping or distraught.  Her loving grand-son has disappeared and foul play is suspected.  You know the rest.  The chirps on the whistle and the look in her eyes remind you it’s time to feel the emotion.  The loss of a mother losing her son, all she has in her life.  Do you need to be hit over the head with dialogue?  Connect the chirps!

But what about the triplets?  Setting the stage for the story, the movie opens with one of the most intense and wonderful animated sequences.  It is a stage performance starring the Triplets of Belleville as a singing and dancing trio, playing to an audience of corpulent partiers.  We learn later that Belleville is a corrupt, fat, over-indulgent version of New York City, complete with a fat Statue of Liberty!  Maybe Chomet had a bad experience in the Village.  We don’t know for sure.  But all we know in the beginning is the Triplets’ have this great stage act with music, gibberish for singing, fat fans, oh, and a hungry set of dancing shoes that eat the Fred Astair look-alike during his act.  All is not as it seems in Belleville.  There is badness afoot, hunger amongst the over-consumption.

Cut to the grand-mother and son and years of growing up together.  The inseparable bond of family, complete with dog.  The railroad builds a train track over the top of the house, but the bond stays the same.  Even the dog stays the same.  He gets old and fat, but still barks at the train passing by, remembering the boy’s toy train that ran over his tail when he was a puppy.  The railroad doesn’t just go over the house, the tracks run into the house and push the house out of the way as they follow their route.  But the house doesn’t fall.  It stands its ground.

Eventually the van and the ship finish the work the train started: the tearing asunder of the family by a heartless kidnapping.  And so starts the daring and improbable journey of the grand-mother, peddling a paddle boat across the shimmering ocean to the heart of darkness.  Where else?  Belleville.  The sea shimmers under the moon, transparent and beautiful.  A bed for the voyager. The ships and buildings are monstrously tall, like you would see in a nightmare.  Every car has teeth to eat you. 

As the Triplets grow old and no longer perform on stage, their instruments transform from the unusual to the bizarre.  They forge swords into plow-shares in harvesting their meals from a nearby pond and continue to perform nightly, if only for themselves.  The grand-mother is taken into their performing group, tapping out notes on one of her son’s bicycle rims.  The unlikely five-some, living in their world of dreams, takes on the criminals of Belleville in the final battle to free the kidnapped cyclist.

The “David vs. Goliath” theme of the mother’s fight against the mafia is much the same as the struggle of the young heroine in “Spirited Away” to free the souls of her parents from imprisonment and reverse their horrible transformation.  Both movies exalt the simple virtues of loyalty, honesty and simplicity and condemn the more “adult” and “civilized” traits of wealth, consumption and sensual pleasure.  The earth, water, buildings, machines, sun, moon and sky are all players, each showing the way to those who will just open their eyes and see.  A hard movie to watch, but one that keeps on giving.  You will have to work to get this one to come to town, but if it does, don’t miss it.