Amazingly, each of the visual effects was created without using CGI, meaning that they are all handmade. Each movement is carefully choreographed while still maintaining an air of silliness, as if watching a live-action cartoon. It would be refreshing to see a slightly more 21st-century approach to Chloé’s characterization, but it is clear that Vian’s “imagining from one end to the other” is incredibly present - the characters seem to appear from his brain without much explanation or reason.Īpart from this issue, which would be difficult to tackle considering the original text hails from 1947, the film is visually stunning. This film operates under a juvenile lens and directly adapts a novel that was written during a time of heightened gender roles, which would explain Colin’s dated romantic views. However, Tatou’s Chloé introduces some much needed leveling to Colin’s bumbling-Romeo archetype and equalizes their relationship to something that I could agree with. From a feminist standpoint, the problematic original viewpoint of Colin is much of what we are still encountering in romantic comedies today: women are a reward to be attained and the ideal woman is pure without fault. If this film comments on anything at all, it would be that everything must come to an end or that nothing is perfect enough to last. For these quasi-children, reality comes crashing in on their play-world in a highly unrealistic way. The bright Technicolor of their lives before the illness becomes corrupt and musty.
Shortly after Chloé and Colin’s wedding, Chloé falls ill with an impossibly strange cancer-like water lily growing in her right lung.įrom this point onward, the film takes a devastatingly dark spiral downward.
Everything about these characters (including their four friends) is incredibly childlike: emotions are grand and, for the first half of the film, accented with an optimistic twist. They instantly fall for each other, despite Colin’s clumsy antics, and so begins their sickeningly cute love story. Colin quickly becomes obsessed with the idea of finding a girlfriend, as Nicolas (Omar Sy) and his best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh) have Colin becomes Romeo-esque in that he is obsessed with love or “the perfect girl”, but doesn't think about it more deeply than that.Įnter Chloé (Audrey Tautou). The protagonist, Colin (Romain Duris), lives comfortably with his cook/mentor/lawyer, Nicolas, in a very Jetsons-meets-Magical Realism apartment. The story that takes place in this snow-globe world follows a small group of friends.
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