The City of Lost Children · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Krank sits in his chair, wired to a sleeping child, and waits to be carried somewhere lovely. The dream arrives, and it curdles. Every time. A creature built without the ability to dream cannot borrow one without spoiling it; the wonder turns to terror the instant he reaches for it. It is the saddest machine in the film and the most revealing. Krank is an apparatus for making images that cannot make its own — which is to say he is a little model of cinema, and of why Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro built this fogbound port in the first place.

Start with the dreams, because the film does. Deleuze has a name for an image like the opening nightmare, where malfunctioning Santa Clauses multiply across a nursery until the room drowns in them: the onirosign, the dream-image. It is not a flashback. A flashback dates itself, points back to a former present you could place on a calendar. The dream-image points nowhere. It is a circuit of images cut loose from memory, and its signature, for Deleuze, is world-movement: the dreamer goes still while the world moves for him. Watch the child in Krank's harness. The body lies inert; the dream is a world set spinning around it. This is exactly what Krank is starving for. Dreams are how a body lives forward into time, how it makes a future, and a man who cannot dream is a man who cannot age in the right direction. So he steals the motion of other people's time. The premise is a fairy tale and a piece of Bergson at once.

But Krank is not only sad; he is voracious, and that pulls the film toward what Deleuze calls the impulse-image. Beneath the social surface of any naturalist world he saw a savage "originary world" of pure drives, appetites running down an irreversible slope toward exhaustion and death — the line of slope. The City is full of these slopes. Krank consumes dreams the way an addict consumes; the stolen dream is a fetish, a part-object siphoned off and hoarded. And the port around him keeps peeling back to show the predatory engine underneath: the blind Cyclops cult harvesting children, the Siamese-twin Octopus running her ring of orphan thieves, a flea-borne serum that turns people into instruments of someone else's want. The riveted, dripping town is the derived milieu. The hunger is the originary world showing through it.

That showing-through is a matter of light, and here the film pays an old debt out loud. Darius Khondji's camera leans on wide-angle lenses that bend faces into caricature, on a bilious green-and-amber murk where every lamp is fogged and every shadow has weight. Deleuze tied this gradient of light and dark to Expressionism, to the German line where things carry a non-organic life and a face becomes a landscape of a single charged quality. Daniel Emilfork's Krank is that face: gaunt, anguished, more pitiable than wicked, a contour you read like weather. The sets do the same work the painted flats of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari once did — architecture as a diagram of a mind. The design is not a backdrop to the psychology. It is the psychology.

Then there is the teardrop. One tear sets off a Rube Goldberg chain that ricochets across the whole town, each consequence triggering the next, until an absurd machine of cause and effect has rolled all the way to its punchline. Deleuze admired a specifically French school of montage built on water, on machinery, on the maximum of fluid movement, and this sequence is its giddy descendant. Hervé Schneid cuts each beat like a gear-tooth advancing a clock. The invention is technical as well as comic: digital compositing, still novel in 1995, welds discrete practical elements into one unbroken causal flourish. The same early digital grade that pulls the whole film toward its sepia-green also lets the filmmakers stitch impossible space. This is a genuine hinge in film history, the digital intermediate arriving years before it became standard, and arriving in service of a hand-built, almost steampunk materiality rather than slick illusion.

What keeps the film from being only a vitrine of curiosities is Krank's central impossibility, and Deleuze gives it a name too. The crystal-seed is the spontaneous moment when an inner world begins to form, to crystallize. Krank's tragedy is that no seed ever takes in him. Around him the film crystals helplessly — Dominique Pinon plays a whole troupe of identical cloned brothers, a hall of mirrors with no original, an enclosed offshore world with no outside. Everyone reflects everyone. Only Krank stays uncrystallized, dreamless, aging.

The plot is thin on purpose, an armature on which to hang invention, closer to Grimm and the fairground than to science fiction. It came out of Jeunet and Caro's own Delicatessen, leaned on Gilliam's ductwork and Švankmajer's menacing objects, and seeded the clockwork whimsy and graded palette Jeunet would later soften into Amélie. Watch it again for one thing: Krank's face the moment a stolen dream goes wrong. The film's whole sorrow is in it. He wanted the world to move, and it will only move away from him.