I feel there is an injustice being carried out here. Even as I sit eating my croissants to write this review, I feel I’m missing out on something I should already know. This is not the first Corto Maltese animated movie ever made you see, and the name strikes me as one familiar enough to make it feel like I’m jumping headfirst into a universe I should already know the rules to. The main injustice though, the main problem that prevents me from being completely prepared and level to review this movie is...that I was not born in France.
You really need to be French to watch this movie. More accurately, you will be French if you watch it. It is unavoidable. This is not like Wakfu or Oban Star Racers where France is imitating other countries in style and in subject matter; Corto Maltese is FRENCH. It bleeds it and, through the act of watching it, it bleeds into you too.
Take the main character for example, the eponymous Corto. He has precisely one facial expression: smug asshole, and when he’s not looking like one he’s busy talking like one, mocking people and their possessions wherever he goes with an easy, bemused contempt that seems to come naturally to the French (even though he himself is not). What’s impressive, however, is his ability to display this contempt during the long and wistful silences he creates whenever someone is waiting for him to talk back to them. With absolutely no change in either posture or facial expression you can still see that raw, screaming FUCK YOU come beaming out of him and into the minds of everyone present; audience included. It really is remarkable, and gives him the same kind of watchability as Daniel Craig’s James Bond at the end of Casino Royale, only with less one-liners and more beatific nonchalance.
In a lot of ways, the James Bond franchise would be a fine point of comparison for this movie; the exotic locales of Hong Kong, dealing with the Russians in Siberia and the fallout of war, Corto being a naval officer, the undertaking of a mission and the polite meetings that all the characters have with each other regardless of if they are friend or foe. Everything moves nicely and looks beautiful (including the women, which is important for any good adventure). Some of the effects let it down- the smoke effects from gunfire and the unseen 1950s style ‘gunwounds’ grind otherwise satisfying spouts of combat down into PG and dodgy CGI territory, but those niggles aside the mirror to 007 still holds up well.
What shatters the comparison is how relaxed the movie is. It moves along with the urgency of a noir detective lighting up a cigarette; it doesn’t matter what is going on in any particular scene, how fast-paced the action moves or how massive the scale of the tragedy, the music stays as sedate and as soothing as it was when overlooking the junk-ships in the Hong Kong harbour. The women are bored despite their beauty, their emotions perpetually glazed and subdued, only cracking through to the surface when they can grasp onto something to hate, whether in anger or in sorrow. Everyone is just doing what they are supposed to do in order to pass the time; even those with ambition never seem to be in a hurry to realise them.
This lethargy and stillness even goes so far as to affect the details of the plot. Simply put; nothing is explained adequately and chance plays too large a role. You don’t know what is planned and what isn’t, who is supposed to be meeting who by design and which meetings are by fluke, or even why some people are meeting in the first place. There is a snatch of dialogue early on that encapsulates this phenomenon and the films attitude toward it perfectly in regards to Corto coming in contact with a friend of his.
Officer: Today, we find his trail: He’s with you. Chance or coincidence?
Corto: (Placidly) Probably both, Lt. Barrow
Despite this damning underlining of the use of such coincidence in the story, this line...well, in some ways it actually saves the narrative, because in the end even you find yourself adopting this attitude. No-one reacts in the film in regard to these improbable and chance occurrences, as if everyone knew it was going to fall out this way from the beginning, so the audience in turn ends up accepting it too. Because hey, why not?
This is the truly insidious thing about this film; the thing that I spoke of way up there near the start-: You WILL become French if you watch it. You get saturated so much in its tired, serene outlook that in the end, you become every bit the bored French lover just trying to pass the time by watching it. No amount of violence or tension will shock, and rather than attaching to the series of events you will willingly distance yourself, watching everyone play their parts with a cool eye and a clear head. It becomes obvious why the film’s idea of comedy is two people having a friendly conversation; the very notion of people being nice to each other becomes a laughable one. In the end the only thing that will surprise is how long the movie lasts-: like your tedious existence, it seems to go on without end.
And yet. For all of this, it is the movie which has done this. It takes the tricolour and lances it straight through your heart, and damn if that wasn’t its intention. I can’t say that it’s bad; even objectively I can’t say that – the score is nice, the resolution is sound, and even if they don’t show it on their faces the characters show their involvement through their fists. Hell, even Corto is disdainfully compelling as a character. The curtain of sluggishness the movie throws over you may make you feel otherwise, but you aren’t actually just killing time by watching this movie.
Overall, my feelings about it are almost Parisian. It was intriguing but not particularly engaging; I have a fondness for the characters even though I don’t care about them; and despite the fact I don’t know if I even enjoyed it, I do know that I’d happily watch it again and will seek out more of Maltese’s adventures in my own time.
Whatever it is this team has done...they did it well.
Summary: Early 20th century James Bond starts slow, ends slow, and does it with a style, ease, and arrogance that overtakes its strange sequence-of-events nature.
Wanna watch for yourself? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzyHMB_crk
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