The City of Lost Children (1995)

The City of Lost Children” is a dark tale with a weird (at first sight) plot. In a depressing city, as if seeing in someone’s gothic nightmare, small children are trying to survive under the dominion of three different poles of power.

  • The two twin witches which use the children as toys to steal money,jewelry and whatever valuable may be found from the city’s inhabitants
  • A crazy scientist surrounded by a number of clones, a midget female laboratory assistant  and a brain (!) in a nutrient solution, helping him to achieve his ultimate goal: to find a child with a joyful dream
  • A mob of humans with the right eye blind and a transplant of a mechanical eye in the place of left eye who steal children in order to provide them to the scientist

Freaked so far? Well, this is just the beginning of the tale but there are also good news. A grown-up with the heart of a child and the size of a giant, in the pursuit of the humans-with-the-transplants, who took away the thing he loved the most: a child he found in the trash can and managed to raise it to a five-year old.

Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet created one of the most subversive and optimistic (yes, this is not a typo) films in the movie history visualizing with a pallet of gray and black the past and present of OUR children. It would be nice if you would see the movie first and then read the analysis that follows in this post, so that the references to the film’s scenes make sense. Continue reading