Warm as a christmas carol, this story about a pair of lovable children is a dickensian painting come to life. The film has a dreamlike, fairytale quality. Not least of the attractions is the wonderful acting. The liquid human face with its melting expressions is another. The film features an automaton which is more human than humans.
An orphan boy with a genius for repairing clockwork gadgets is being hounded by a wonderfully characterized policeman. The imagery of clockworks and rotating wheels and meshes of gears pervades the film pehaps as a metaphor for life. Scorcese is a renowned conservator of film and he esconces his own passion for the medium by narrating the history of cinema through the life of one of it's forgotten pioneers, Georges Melier.
The film itself is a complex piece of clockwork and is cinema for cinema's sake and certainly grabs your attention for its span. And surely 3D works fine here because if there is one thing in the universe that is three dimensional, it is a railway station!
A rich gourmet feast of cinema specially for sensitive children and adults.
2 comments:
I hope George Melies (not Melier :-)) has not been forgotten!
It's the first, and possibly last, I heard of him, receding down memory lane as fast as Hugo.
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