The City of Lost Children: The technical genius stands tall, and the charm still works (review)

Caro-Jeunet’s film will return this evening to France 5, in a beautiful restored version.

In 1995, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro teamed up again, three years after the success of Delicatessenfor an original fantasy tale titled The City of Lost Children. A work that marked its time, and which recently came out in a restored version. The opportunity to publish a new review, which we share today to wait until the rebroadcast of the film, at 9 p.m. on France 5.

Caro and Jeunet present The City of Lost Children in Première (Classics n°23)

Caro and Jeunet’s ultimate project has therefore not aged like a bad Beineix. The technical genius stands tall, and the charm still works…

Barely a few months after Luc Besson and his LeonCaro and Jeunet were also filming a story of ambiguous friendship between a silent colossus and a girl to slip into the envelope of a “blockbuster made in France” – it was an industrial concept that was on the rise at the time. In quick succession, these two films have also impressed very strongly on the other side of the Atlantic, so strongly that they have become the classics there that they will probably never be here. This world is cruel.

Fall back in 2023 on The City of Lost Children in this sometimes impressive, often debatable new 4K copy, indeed lets see the considerable trace that this bubbling steampunk madness of ideas left in the American science fiction cinema of the time. We see whole sections of DarkCity (Proyas was really close to plagiarism), so to Matrix (the hero, played by Ron Perlman, is called One but could have been called Neo). Moreover, one of the most wonderfully sadistic ideas of the film (the late François Hadji-Lazaro connects his optic nerve in the brain of one of his victims to force him to watch himself die) was taken up as it is in the Strange Days by Kathryn Bigelow.

With the modesty that has always characterized him, Jean-Pierre Jeunet affirms in a very funny bonus that the genius of special effects, Phil Tippett (whose mad god just released), requires all of these followers to have seen at least once in their life The city… before coming to work alongside him. And the worst part is that it’s probably true.

Cannibals at low cost: Delicatessen told by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, Darius Khondji…