The prominent American film critic Roger Ebert was very enthusiastic about the design and visuals of La Cité des enfants perdus, although the plot escaped him. This doesn't surprise me: I'd call the film something of a whiz-bang steampunk nightmare.
This film, coming four years after Delicatessen (1991), is the second and final co-directed film with Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Alien, la résurrection (1997) is the only Jeunet film I've not seen, although (certainly with the exception of Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009)) he has more recently tended to move away from the steampunk atmospheres.
Krank (Daniel Emilfork) lives on a disused offshore oilrig with clones of Dominique Pinon (one of Jeunet's acteurs fétiches), the very weird Martha (Mireille Mossé), 'Uncle Irvin' (a brain in a fish tank with the voice of Jean-Louis Trintignant) can't dream and is ageing. He seeks to kidnap children in order to steal their dreams. I could go on but it gets crazier and crazier.
Miette (the nine-year-old Monique Vittet) is for me the only saving grace of the film, but that's not saying a great deal about this disaster. After the brilliant Delicatessen, this is a very weird follow-up by a director who later came up with much better: an unfortunate blip.
NB. It could be that my lack of appreciation for this film was the impossibility for me to it listen to it in the original language, although I have my doubts.
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