Watch out, spoilers!
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The first feature film by Sylvain Chomet, whom we know as a wonderful animator,
"My Attila Marcel" (Attila Marcel, 2013)
Film critics who wrote about this film, for some reason, all the time tried to compare it with Michel Gondry, then with Wes Anderson. If I was a little familiar with both of them, I wouldn't have drawn them here.
Sylvain Shome boldly stepped into the feature film, taking with him all his wonderful animated arsenal along with the music that everywhere accompanies his strange at first glance heroes, along with the grotesque, only highlighting the rather sad in fact the story of the main character, along with an abundance of extremely picturesque details, and all this even more attracts a benevolent viewer.
This is the story of the rather autistic protagonist Paul (Guillaume Gui) - an extremely capable musician who plays the piano wonderfully and even eventually wins the piano competition, but does not say a word after he saw his parents die in his infancy, in whose death, at the suggestion of (perhaps even non-verbalized) aunts who raised him and still care and use him, he blames his father. He idolizes his mother, but removes his father from all the photos, he does not remember, but very much wants to know what happened then, but no one tells him, and everything flows in a constant routine until he accidentally encounters a neighbor who practices his method of ridding people of difficult memories (it is not by chance that Proust’s statement about the influence of memories is an epigraph for the film). There are many allusions in the film, against which the viewer will slip, not very inclined to analysis, but we will notice them - and the fact that the neighbor's name is Madame Proust, it is also not accidental. The end turns out to be both sad and bright, the circumstances of the death of his parents are clarified, they are not at all as he could imagine, life goes on, although instead of a piano, Paul now plays the ukulele inherited from Madame Proust, and, let us hope, for a new generation she will be happy.
The genre of this film is difficult to define, I would refer it to the genre of “good film”, if one existed.