It's a quaint little story about how a 30-ish mute "young" pianist Paul (Guillaume Gouix) whose almost mechanical doll life as accompanist for the dance lessons of his two comical unmarried aunts Annie (Bernadette Lafont) and Anna (Hélène Vincent) who jointly brought him up as if he were their adopted son since the tragic death of both his parents, a pair of love birds on and off the wrestling stage from which they make their living, during a house collapse whilst Paul was still two years old, the trauma of which rendered him a permanent mute. He spends all his time practising the piano, having meals with his aunts and sitting in the park or playing the piano to entertain his aunt's friends or providing the rhythm for all kinds of dances taught by his aunts to retirees and sometimes younger folks at their dance sessions. His only joy appears to be the "chouettes" which he could never do without during the breaks in his piano playing But one finds a certain mecanicalness in his play, all technically correct but somehow lacking in any feelings. Everything starts to change when he meets a middle aged hippy-ish Buddhist lady sitting in the park, playing a haunting song on the ukelele, Madame Proust (Anne Le Ny). She's in fact a neighbor living on the 4th floor of the same building. She lives with her enormous black dog which she calls a "bear" and cultivates all kinds of herbal plants including some mushrooms having hallucinogenic effects right inside her apartment with the help of sun lamps and pots and has a number of clients, including a doctor who always wanted to become a vet but not a doctor as his family wanted. Madame Proust finds an inconsolable sadness in the eyes of Paul, pities him and gives him one of her idiosyncratic "treatments" for erasing bad memories and replacing them with good ones. According to her, memories must be caught, with a bait, a hook and with infinite patience. With her help, happier memories of his childhood gradually return, bit by bit, diluting the bad memory of the shock he got when his parents house collapsed. In the meantime, Paul meets in the same park Anita ( Kea Kaing) a young Chinese girl cellist and erwu player, the adopted daughter of one of her aunts' best friends and who, an orphan like him, a socially inept who has difficulties relating to normal people in the conventional manner. But all good things must come to an end. Madame Proust decides that that her time has come after she lodged a sit-in protest against the municipal authorities cutting down an old tree which for years has been giving shade to the young and old in the neighborhood park but failed and on top of that getting herself almost a prison term for threatening to use a knife against the municipal official charged with the mission of cutting down the tree. In the process, the ukelele she was then playing with some other hippie musician there got broken. Paul recovered it, meticulously repaired it and then went to her grave, originally thinking to deposit it in front of her tombstone but after placing it there, it suddenly started to rain. The sound of the raindrops hitting its soundbox made some clear musical notes. Upon hearing the those notes, Paul changed his mind. He took it off the grave and placed it under his overcoat. Soon we see him playing the on the instrument the favorite melody he used to hear Madame Proust play at the park and sometimes in her own apartment.
Paul's name was entered in a piano competition for "young" pianists, 33 years being the very last year his aunts could enter his name as a qualifying "youth" in that competition. During the last stages of the competition, Paul suddenly recalled the happy moments when his parents' friends, dressed as muppets, were playing some jazzy fun song with a scintillating rhythms at a rollicking party. He could feel the joy surging inside his heart, a joy which his fingers instantly transformed into notes on the piano keyboard giving his music the kind of soul that it never previously had and he won! When the film ends, we find Paul and Anita in front of the Grand Canyon, with Anita calling Paul's attention that their child seems about to speak his first human word, "papa" and is trying hard to encourage him. Paul turns around, crouches in front of the pram, pokes his face close to that of the child, and teaches him to say his first word, "Papa", exactly as Paul remembers what his own parents did before that tragic accident which shocked him into his permanent muteness! Paul is able to speak again: the curse is lifted, dissolved as if by magic.
The film is full of outlandish characters: his blind piano tuner who strikes and then readjust every vertical metal bar on the railing to the spiral staircase to makes sure that they sound the same, M. Kruzinsky, a piano teacher who will only accept cash and would never lose any chance to gorge himself on cakes brought in by the parents of his students, Paul's two aunts who would never be seen or be doing anything separately and who synchronize every one of their gestures, the doctor who frequents Madame Proust who keeps all kinds of stuffed animal with huge eyes staring into people's face in his clinic because his true wish is to be a veterinarian etc. It's full of fun loving people too: Paul's parents and their friends on the beach.
I like the photography Antoine Roch, clear, bright and colorful and beaming with the zest of life and poetic excess. I also like the excellent music which seems to carry the film along greatly reducing the need for unnecessary words: just images and music and fun: pure cinema. In passing, I cannot but notice what appears a deliberate "hook" used by Chomet to catch our memories of the famous writer of A la Recherche du Temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time): Marcel Proust and what he's doing in his world-renowned novel about the workings of human consciousness in recalling the past and whose words" we can find everything in our memory" is shown on the screen at the start of the film. The one who cures Paul is "Madame Proust" and she uses almost exactly same kind of things which precipitated the incessant flood of the memories of Swann in the novel: herbal tea and madeleines.The acting of all the characters are uniformly good, especially the mute Guillaume Gouix and that of Anne Le Ny. In short, a cinematic gem! The more "serious" cinema goer may want more "substance", but for me, perhaps, all life may be little more than what's on the "surface", the surface of things, the surface of people, the surface their movements, the surface of human "memory". If we scratch below the surface, we'd probably find more surfaces. Perhaps in the end it's surfaces all the way, as Ibsen's Peer Gynt found out and as taught by the Buddha and now as quantum physicists find right at the heart of the atom: a void? Perhaps in the final analysis, what gives those surfaces some kind of "meaning" is the love one finds in or what one infuses into life and perhaps the love of life itself which, if we're lucky, we may find to be pervading the infinite number of surfaces of we find in the universe from time to time. If so, and if we got those, what do we care about the rest?
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