Heartbeat Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville follows a grandmother and her obese dog on a journey to rescue her cyclist son from the captivity of the French-American mafia, helped by a trio of elderly women ex-vaudeville performers. Kidnapped via his exhaustion from the ongoing Tour de France, he’s forced into a construction of enslavement of the most industrial kind, where his bodily autonomy becomes a mere engine for machines. The son (named Champion) and the other two cyclists with him are shown as horses, long faces and loping, miserable expressions in their labor. In comparison, the life with his grandmother is shown in a kind of primitive harmony. The domestic sounds of her tinkering about their shared home form a rhythm that he operates by, dancing silently to the tune she plays for him. His role as the dancer and the importance of the grandmother as the musician is further reinforced by the fact of him early on attempting to play piano and finding no interest in it, instead desiring cycling (dancing) - which he indulges in rhythmic circles along the twinkling of his metal machine. The music ceases, to be replaced with discipline and in response his grandmother journeys in pursuit of the leviathan across the ocean, to the decadence of America. There, she is forced to learn poetry at a deeper level than the domestic - beyond the veil of the eternal (the sublime ocean) she enters this other realm, the dreamworld of desire. Her own playing, clumsy and crass, is interrupted by the sisters who use the same domestic instruments as her to produce music with far more complexity than hers - one that eventually leads the grandmother and the sisters on their way to finding Champion and breaking him out of his industrial enslavement, riding off into the nighttime wilderness together.
Catalytic Alembic
Catalytic Alembic
Catalytic Alembic
Heartbeat Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville follows a grandmother and her obese dog on a journey to rescue her cyclist son from the captivity of the French-American mafia, helped by a trio of elderly women ex-vaudeville performers. Kidnapped via his exhaustion from the ongoing Tour de France, he’s forced into a construction of enslavement of the most industrial kind, where his bodily autonomy becomes a mere engine for machines. The son (named Champion) and the other two cyclists with him are shown as horses, long faces and loping, miserable expressions in their labor. In comparison, the life with his grandmother is shown in a kind of primitive harmony. The domestic sounds of her tinkering about their shared home form a rhythm that he operates by, dancing silently to the tune she plays for him. His role as the dancer and the importance of the grandmother as the musician is further reinforced by the fact of him early on attempting to play piano and finding no interest in it, instead desiring cycling (dancing) - which he indulges in rhythmic circles along the twinkling of his metal machine. The music ceases, to be replaced with discipline and in response his grandmother journeys in pursuit of the leviathan across the ocean, to the decadence of America. There, she is forced to learn poetry at a deeper level than the domestic - beyond the veil of the eternal (the sublime ocean) she enters this other realm, the dreamworld of desire. Her own playing, clumsy and crass, is interrupted by the sisters who use the same domestic instruments as her to produce music with far more complexity than hers - one that eventually leads the grandmother and the sisters on their way to finding Champion and breaking him out of his industrial enslavement, riding off into the nighttime wilderness together.