by Nathan Wolfson

Brazil focussed on the insecurities of a shrinking middle class in an ever-increasingly bureaucratized, self-destroying industrial world (and concluded that the only means for a "happy ending" consisted of the protagonist's absolute decent into insanity). In contrast, while it buys into much of the same metaphysical premises (and post-modern art direction) of its cousin, The City of Lost Children concerns itself not with dysfunctional members of its bourgeoisie. Rather, City brings to the fore the fringe elements of such a society: the street performers, the recluses, the terminally impoverished, the homeless, and the lost children.

With the inscrutable logic of a dream, Jeunet and Caro unfold their deliberate tale. Children are being kidnapped from the tenement neighborhood adjacent to the docks in an apparently large industrial city. These abductions are carried out by a legion of previously blind minions who have been fitted with a primitive sight-for-the-blind device, in return for their child-procuring services. The children are being shepherded to a large off-shore facility for what seem to be an odd series of medical experiments focussed on the abductees' dreaming processes.

Just why those conducting the experiments have such an interest in dreaming forms the crux of the tale. These scientifically-minded individuals can't dream. What at first might appear to be a dig at science, clearly isn't. At least, not in such an obvious manner. Rather, late in the film, the manner in which this off-shore outpost was created -- and the arrival of its inhabitants -- slowly becomes plain. At the heart of these matters is an absent scientist with a good heart who has lost all recollection of what he created. His creation has become an instigator of macabre social practices -- in order to fill a void the scientist hadn't realized would be there.

It all smacks more than a little of a nuanced re-telling of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. But in this instance, the monster consists of multiple "people". And rather than inflicting mayhem directly, a vast social order grows out of this monster's frustrations, in which those least able to defend themselves (poor children) are also, ironically, the most apparent key to the cure to what ails this impersonal beast. The "cure" doesn't work, but why should it?

Looking into the dreams of children, manipulating them, and trying to recover some lost humanity in the process proves fruitless. Ironically, these same dream spaces prove the undoing of the monster(s). A film can be likened to a dream in some important ways (though it obviously differs from one, too). If City is the dream space we share with these talented French filmmakers, one is tempted to wonder what transformations are worked on the audience through the experience of the film. It is here that the cynicism of City becomes apparent.

The cold, metaphysically mechanized world Jeunet and Caro create mimics our own in its relentless cause and effect. No two events, no matter how disparate, occur unrelated. But at their core, narratives progress without regard to human intention. Well-meant acts turn sour. "Chance" capriciously dictates the culmination of events far more vociferously than even the most deliberate actions. Heroism and villainy result more from circumstance than from kindness of heart or deceit. The monsters of City reach the horrible conclusion that humanity was never nor ever will be theirs. City's people have no effective agency. The viewer is confronted with the disarming notion that her life and her world are not of her own creation. And Jeunet and Caro work hard to convince us that, try as we might to be otherwise, we are but an audience in this life.