A MAGNIFICENT LIFE Review: It Shows One, Animated

Biopics aren't my favorite kind of film. The things a person has done are often more interesting than the person himself, and it is not often that you need to know the background story of the person, what motivated him. Often you're just shown talent, or necessity, or opportunity. Or what happened. So for me it wasn't without irony that I noticed that one of my favorite films this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam was I Swear, a biopic. It even won the audience award, as if to rub it in. And it wasn't even the only biopic I liked at the festival: master animator Sylvain Chomet, of The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist fame, had made a nice one too. His subject: the famous French playwright and director Marcel Pagnol.

The film starts in the early 1970s, a few years before Mr. Pagnol's death. He has promised to write his memoirs for a magazine, but try as he might, he cannot remember his early life. That changes when he gets visited by an imaginary friend, a ghost of his younger self called Marcel. Marcel remembers everything, and as the two exchange stories, we as the audience are transported back in time, to Pagnol's youth. And later, to Paris as an adult, where he managed to make a career out of writing about the region he grew up in, Marseille.

Paris doesn't give him an easy start though. At first, the snobby Parisians thumb their noses at anything spoken in the Marseille dialect. But Pagnol's plays get popular acclaim, financial success and finally critical acceptance. Then, at the end of the 1920s, Marcel Pagnol encounters cinema and, infatuated by its endless possibilities, decides to create a film studio in France. As Pagnol grows older, more and more ghosts appear in his life. Not just younger selves, but also dead friends and family members, all helping him secretly.

Sylvain Chomet makes beautiful films and A Magnificent Life is no exception. The style is more realistic than the one used in The Triplets of Belleville, but faces are slightly oversized caricatures, like in political cartoons, and the color palette is nice and warm as a holiday. The question remains whether Marcel Pagnol as a person was interesting enough to follow around for 90 minutes. To answer that: the ghosts help a lot (I like the film's original title better, which translates as Marcel and Mister Pagnol). At times Chomet's film becomes so fantastical that I wondered if it was about a person who actually existed, or some imagined stand-in, conjured to guide us through a certain place and time in French history. But the script is actually based on Pagnol's autobiography, and if you look up some of the weirder coincidences in his life, it appears that those really happened.

Still, as a story it comes dangerously close to being a hagiography. Pagnol indeed lived a magnificent life, but the film never puts any question marks next to Pagnol's deeds. Good things he achieved, bad things just befell him, it seems in this criticism-less retelling. Thankfully it doesn't hurt the film too much, it's a pleasant enough trip through several turbulent decades of the 20th century. And if you're a lover of classic French cinema there is even a lot more to appreciate here, as there are plenty of famous faces to spot, it's a veritable feast of recognition. I'm not a lover, just an occasional fan, and I liked it a lot already.


(A Magnificent Life has been playing festivals worldwide for the past year, and will première this week in American cinemas.)