Directed by Sylvain Chomet
(PG)
***
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The animator Sylvain Chomet is a filmmaker who “doesn’t need dialogue” to tell an emotionally complex story, said Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor. This touching work, his first movie since 2003’s delightfully droll The Triplets of Belleville, follows an aging traveling magician as he develops a paternal bond with a teenage chambermaid who’s dazzled by his illusions. The characters barely speak, but they don’t need to: Their semicomic tale finds moments that “match the piercing melancholy” of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. Mid-20th-century Edinburgh “never looked more fairy-tale gorgeous” than it does when the pair settles into shabby lodgings alongside some acrobats, a ventriloquist, and “the inevitable sad clown,” said Amy Biancolli in the Houston Chronicle. The movie, drawn from a script by the late French screen star Jacques Tati, is also often funny, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. Mostly, though, it’s a quiet tragedy about “the gulf that can grow between a father and daughter as the latter moves forward and the former stays put.” It helps us believe in magic only to the point that we should.
