Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Triplets of Belleville
2003 · Sylvain Chomet · The Triplets of Belleville on Sightlines
Champion's legs get into the frame before the rest of him does. Two enormous calves, cabled and shiny, carrying a torso like a sparrow's. His grandmother has a built-up orthopedic shoe and a stumping walk, and she keeps that pace for the whole film and still crosses an ocean. The mafia men are black rectangles that only become human below the knee: trousers, shoes, a gait. Nobody in The Triplets of Belleville explains themselves. You read them off their bodies, and you are never wrong.
That is Sylvain Chomet's invention, and it deserves a precise name: he turned caricature into diagnosis. A cartoonist's exaggeration usually just means funny. Here it means this is what this life has done to this person. Deleuze has a term for a posture that carries a whole social arrangement inside it — the gest, borrowed from Brecht. Not a feeling on a face but an attitude of the body that exposes the relation a person is caught in. Champion's legs are a gest: the Tour de France written into flesh, a boy machined into a component. Souza's shoe is a gest of a life of work and lack. The henchmen's rectangles are the gest of an organisation that has no faces because it doesn't need any.
You can enjoy this film without a word of theory. It's funny, and it's about a grandmother and a dog. The reason to bring Deleuze is that the usual complaint — thin story, all atmosphere — dissolves once you stop looking for plot. Deleuze built his entire cinema project to take seriously films whose meaning lives in bodies, spaces and rhythms rather than in what happens next. Belleville may be the strongest case for that method anywhere in animation. Almost nothing happens. Almost everything gets said.
Chomet learned how to hold a frame from Tati. In Playtime, dialogue sinks into ambient babble and the comedy is planted in deep-focus wide shots where your eye has to go hunting. Deleuze calls this kind of composition a closed set: a frame treated as a system of information, everything in it counted, nothing decorative. Belleville's harbor, thick with its enormous citizens, is a set you scan rather than a background you accept. And those citizens are all drawn the same — which is Deleuze's dividual, a crowd rendered as a single affective unit rather than a sum of persons. The peloton grinding uphill is one animal with many legs. So are the identical rectangles. So, tenderly, are the Triplets: three old women who cook, fish and perform as one organism.
Early in Cinema 1, Deleuze says something about cartoons that still sounds strange. The drawn figure is never in a pose. It is always mid-formation, so every frame is an any-instant-whatever: an ordinary point on a curve, not a climax. Chomet stages that claim in his opening music-hall cartoon, all rubber-hose limbs and inky grotesques, the Fleischer logic of Bimbo's Initiation, where a leg is a length of hose and a body is whatever the next frame requires. He puts animation's founding elasticity on screen in the first minutes, then spends ninety more applying it to anatomy that has to live with the consequences.
The story runs on what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image. Big-form action is a situation pressing on a hero until one decisive act transforms it. The small form runs backwards: a modest act discloses a situation you couldn't previously see. Souza never confronts anyone. She follows, and each thing she does opens the next piece of world. Deleuze's word for that path is the vector, the line of the universe, a zig-zag stitching together places with nothing in common. Provincial France, open Atlantic, Belleville. The pedal-boat crossing is the purest vector in modern animation: two worlds joined by sheer absurd persistence, taking exactly as long as it takes. The performance grammar is Chaplin's. City Lights proved a feature could carry its whole plot and all its feeling on pantomime; Belleville revives that contract at a moment when mainstream animation had decided audiences needed everything spoken aloud.
Belleville the city needs a different concept. Deleuze reserved the impulse-image for films in which a recognisable place turns out to be a crust over raw appetite — naturalism, after Zola. Beneath the ordinary milieu of streets and restaurants sits an originary world of pure drives: eating, taking, sliding downhill. Belleville is drawn as precisely that. Its Statue of Liberty has gone corpulent. Its citizens are uniform in their hugeness. Its economy is a gambling racket. Chomet keeps the satire from curdling by refusing to exempt anyone we love: Bruno is a fat, anxious dog organised entirely around dinner and the passing train, and the Triplets get by on frog stew. The colour does the same work. Warm faded sepia-brown for Souza's European past, congested and sickly for the American city. That is Deleuze's colour-image: a colour that absorbs the scene and its feeling instead of describing its light. Belleville has no naturalistic light at all. It has a mood with a palette.
The film's sharpest idea is the kidnappers' business. Cyclists pedal machines bolted to a floor while men bet on them. Nothing moves. Deleuze's reflection-image is what happens when an action stops being performed and becomes a figure of itself, transposed into spectacle. There is the whole satire in one setup: effort that once displaced a body along a road is now pure show, and exhaustion belongs to whoever bought the ticket. Mon Oncle is the ancestor — Tati colliding a shambling body against over-designed machinery to expose what the machinery was for. Chomet runs that collision on an economy instead of a kitchen.
Then the Triplets play. Newspaper, vacuum cleaner, refrigerator shelf, bicycle spokes plucked like a bass. It lands as a joke and it settles the film's account with its own soundtrack, which has been percussion from the start: the whirring wheel, Bruno barking on the beat at the train, the slap of the ocean. These women don't own instruments. They are their music, and poverty hasn't touched that.
One passage obeys none of the above. Bruno dreams, and his dreams come in grainy black-and-white, a different film inside the film, quoting the era the Triplets came from. Deleuze calls a dream circuit untethered from any datable memory an onirosign — an image moving through a whole imaginary rather than pointing back at one past. It is the single place the movement-image lets go. Nothing in the dog's dream advances the rescue. We just sit inside an animal's associations: the train, the stairs, the noise, the shape of a life he can't narrate. The most private feeling in the picture, and Chomet gives it to the dog.
What it did: in 2003, with the industry stampeding toward CGI, Belleville argued that computer imagery didn't have to look like Pixar. The 3D is there in the cars, the peloton, the trains, the liner, the churning sea — de-slicked, re-proportioned, hand-treated, moving by caricature logic rather than physics, so it sits down inside the drawing. One of the first features to get that marriage right. It also confirmed a lane that Fantastic Planet had cut thirty years earlier: the adult, auteur-signed animated feature, here financed by European patchwork and released as world cinema rather than family product. Chomet's own short The Old Lady and the Pigeons had built the grotesque old woman and the wordless black comedy in miniature; Belleville scaled it to feature length, and he later made the Tati debt explicit in The Illusionist.
Watch it again for the legs. The gags will find you anyway. Watch instead what each body has been shaped by, and by whom: Champion by the race, the rectangles by whatever they work for, the Triplets by fifty years of having to be their own orchestra, Souza by a grandson. The question the film leaves open is whether the rescue undoes any of it. Champion gets his grandmother back. He still has those legs, and they were never his.
Concepts in play
- the-gest — Champion's grotesquely overdeveloped cyclist's legs on a bird-thin torso; Madame Souza's built-up orthopedic shoe and stumping gait; the mafia henchmen drawn as identical black rectangles, human only from the knees down — postures that expose a social relation rather than a feeling.
- the closed set (cadre) — Framing held long and static, letting gags and behavior play out within a crowded, deep, caricaturally distorted composition — Belleville's harbor thick with obese pedestrians — the Tati/Playtime debt of deep-focus wide shots where the eye must hunt.
- dividual — The mafia henchmen as identical black rectangles; Belleville's citizens uniformly enormous; the Tour peloton rendered as one grinding mass; the three Triplets acting as a single organism.
- any-instant-whatever — The opening 1930s music-hall cartoon quoted almost literally from Bimbo's Initiation — rubber-hose elasticity and inky monochrome grotesques, the drawn figure always mid-formation rather than posed.
- action-image-small-form — The chase-and-rescue spine in which Souza never confronts the organisation but follows, each small act (the pursuit, the pedal-boat crossing) disclosing the next stretch of a hidden situation — silent-comedy fable crossed with picaresque, closer to Chaplin and Tati than to dialogue-driven screenwriting.
- line of the universe — The zig-zag trajectory linking disconnected worlds — provincial France, the open Atlantic crossed on a pedal-boat, the bloated metropolis of Belleville.
- impulse-image — A world organised by appetite: Belleville's uniformly enormous citizens, Bruno's anxious appetite and train-haunting, the Triplets scraping by on frog stew, the mafia's gambling racket.
- originary-world — Belleville staged as satire — a swollen amalgam of New York and Montreal with a corpulent Statue-of-Liberty analog — the concrete city revealed as the crust over a savage world of pure drive.
- the Figure — The mafia's stationary-bicycle gambling racket: cyclists pedalling machines that go nowhere while men bet on them — athletic action transposed into spectacle rather than performed.
- affective colour — Colour and light keyed emotionally rather than naturalistically — warm faded sepia-browns for the European past and Souza's world, sickly congested tones for Belleville.
- onirosign — Bruno's memory-dreams rendered in a separate visual register, grainy black-and-white quoting early cinema and cartoon, advancing nothing in the rescue.