Film Review: Hugo by Scorcese, Neither Fig Nor Grape (With Video)

9 January 2012 by Dimitri Keramitas    1943  
Dimitri Keramitas
By Dimitri Keramitas
Hugo: Neither Fig Nor Grape Hugo (Hugo Cabret in France) is American cinema’s latest valentine to Paris. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris won over French critics and audiences with its depiction of Lost Generation Paris. Now Martin Scorsese has adapted The Invention of Hugo Cabret, another portrait of post-WWI Paris. The French public doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of this film, though it’s not for a lack of affection for the director. France’s relationship with American movies is ambivalent and personal. The French love Allen’s Jewish humor, his New Yorkiness, and his Francophilia. They love Scorsese for his New Yorkiness, energy, and film scholarship. They love Quentin Tarantino for his snarkiness and kinetic style. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg’s films might be popular here but never loved (there’s even resentment of his “Hollywoodization” of the beloved Tin Tin). If Hugo has left audiences somewhat befuddled it’s because the film is, as the French say, ni figue, ni raisin—neither French, nor a true Scorsese film. The first thing one notices is the actors. Scorsese has populated Paris with Englishmen: Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron-Cohen and Christopher Lee. The characters look like they’re going to a dress-up party whose theme is Old Paris, but they don’t speak French or have French accents. Even the story has more to do with Dickens than anything French. The young orphan all alone in the big bad city amidst a menagerie of grotesque villains is typical of Victorian fiction, not the France of Hugo, Balzac, or Zola. It’s not surprising that the books cited by a literature-loving young girl in the film are mostly English. Asa Butterfield and Chloê Grace Moretz in Hugo. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures and GK Films. Hugo tells the story of Hugo Cabret, a boy who’s been orphaned twice. His watchmaker father died in a fire, leaving him a broken automaton that in working condition is capable of writing—Hugo thinks his father has left him a secret message. The automaton is based on a real one that was mechanically programmed to write a few lines. Hugo is taken by his drunkard uncle to help run the giant clock in a Parisian railway station, and then he dies. Hugo winds up living alone in the mechanical innards of the clock, winding it up and maintaining it. A mean-spirited shopkeeper (Kingsley), who catches Hugo pilfering, confiscates his notebook that contains plans for repairing the automaton. Hugo’s effort to get back the precious notebook has several consequences. He makes friends with the shopkeeper’s goddaughter, another orphan no less (solidly played by Chloë Grace Moretz) and is led to a discovery about the automaton. He also learns the real identity of the Scrooge-like shopkeeper. The latter turns out to be none other than Georges Méliès, the magician turned cinema pioneer who made hundreds of fantasy films including A Trip to the Moon in 1902, the first sci-fi film ever made. In this movie Méliès, like the real one, has been reduced to penury, all his works lost (he had to sell the film stock but negatives were found over the years). The first part of the movie is enthralling, but overblown. Scorsese’s direction here resembles the baroque filmmaking of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, Amélie) and he commits many of the faults of this style. Comic scenes are so over-deliberate that they’re more clever than funny. When charm is ladled over a character it’s so overdone the effect can be ghoulish. Shots are so intricate and spectacular they’re more like theme park rides than film sequences. Happily the characters aren’t lost in the bravura technique. Christopher Lee and Asa Butterfield in HUGO. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures and GK Films. Whatever their nationality, the actors are excellent. Asa Butterfield as Hugo is fascinating to watch. The feral eyes set in a sweet face realistically evoke an orphan’s struggle to survive (and is the closest to a real Scorsese character). Kingsley’s impersonation of Méliès is very moving Oscar material, while Christopher Lee as a book dealer nearly steals the show with his malevolent face and from-the-crypt voice. Sacha Baron-Cohen is powerfully creepy as the station inspector, though not as funny as intended. The film’s second half jarringly turns into a film history documentary, with Hugo’s story receding into the background. Here Scorsese indulges his pedagogical side, as in his documentaries on American film and the blues. He wants to tell us about Méliès the conjuror of dreamland masterpieces, a nickelodeon Dali. This is an old canard of Méliès supporters and there’s some truth in it—many Méliès sequences are imaginative and lovely, but in pressing his point Scorsese is a disingenuous conjuror himself. He expertly edits a dazzling montage of Méliès films, and it’s possible there was also some computer enhancement. When one sees Méliès’ films in their entirety, their thinness and gimmickry become…
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By Dimitri Keramitas

Dimitri Keramitas was born and raised in Connecticut, USA, and was educated at the University of Hartford, Sorbonne, and the University of London, and holds degrees in literature and law. He has lived in Paris for years, and directs a training company and translation agency. In addition, he has worked as a film critic for both print and on-line publications, including Bonjour Paris and France Today. He is a contributing editor to Movies in American History. In addition he is an award-winning writer of fiction, whose stories have been published in many literary journals. He is the director of the creative writing program at WICE, a Paris-based organization. He is also a director at the Paris Alumni Network, an organization linking together several hundred professionals, and is the editor of its newletter. The father of two children, Dimitri not only enjoys Paris living but returning to the US regularly and traveling in Europe and elsewhere.