Notes on the Illusionist # 1: National character

In Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist our hero, Tatischeff, is a Frenchman in a strange land. He is a stuffy old geezer, uptight and quietly bewildered by the lives of the British. The sentiment is the fundamental feeling of a foreigner and of an old man.

Which is to say, Tatischeff is not exactly my image of the French mentality, and his meeting with Britain is very much an idiosyncratic one. If anything this buttoned up old gentleman seems, well, rather English on the whole. At least, to me he does.

And with this stuffed shirt as our guide, Britain suddenly seems rather different. It’s not that the men in grey suits disappear, but that they get put in a different place. Kitschy rock and roll is shocking and effete, Scotland loses its last Presbyterian associations, for a polite tourist this country is full of the illogical and the unnerving.

The hero is kind, but polite to the point of absence. The polite people he passes by - the miniature hotel clerks, for example - disappear from the story, leaving us with clearer memories of the charismatic and the inebriated; leaving us with the characters who are either comically raucous or utterly hopeless.

The thing that bears remembering is that the original script (Tati’s, that is) saw Tatischeff in Prague. The distance of Tatischeff from his new home is something that goes beyond the vagaries of nationality. He is a foreigner who works in various jobs and never assimilates - who lives within walking distance of the train station. His kindnesses are sincere but momentary, he never exerts true magic on the world in which he has arrived. Within this context nationality, or rather, national character, is reduced to an issue of aesthetics.