CHICKEN FOR LINDA!
Linda veut du poulet !
2023 eux/2024 nous
Written and directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach
Even without checking, I think you'd know to something close to a certainty that Chicken For Linda! (or, in French, Linda Wants Chicken!, which is more descriptive) was the next film, a substantial number of years removed, of Sébastien Laudenbach, who back in 2016 adapted, directed, and animated (pretty much entirely by himself) the visually-abstract fairy tale, The Girl Without Hands; and I could think you would know that despite their subject matters and storytelling modes being almost entirely different within the broad ambit of "sort of, nominally, not-actually for children," and I suppose despite each being about a young girl in the Frankish part of Europe, though even with the latter we're talking substantially distinct life stages and protagonists separated by about a thousand years. I say this without even thinking they look that much alike. It's more a matter of looking different from everything else in something like the same way, and that way looks extremely cool.
As with The Girl Without Hands, I'm not sure I'm as completely sold on the use it's being put to, there an elemental and rather depersonalized Germanic fairy tale (one of the less popular ones already, for the obvious reasons contained within the title), adapted with hard-nosed "faithfulness" inasmuch as the Grimm Bros. recording could be said to have been faithful, and here an exercise in modernist zaniness about daughters, mothers, and neighborliness in France, such as I strongly believed must have been set in the 1960s until a cellphone appeared. This one finds Laudenbach teaming with a co-writer and co-director, Chiara Malta, an Italian filmmaker whose other work (I think) is all in live-action, and so the supposition I'd make is that Malta sought out Laudenbach as an executor of her concepts, though I could imagine* it might as easily be the case that Laudenbach wanted to make something a little more commercial and cute, and Malta had the requisite skill in that regard when Laudenbach's main experience was telling the story that goes, "so, you sold my virginity to the devil, that was an oopsie, dad." Well, this one starts with the girl's father choking to death during dinner before the infant's eyes, constituting her last and only even halfway-firm memory of him. It's still cuter.
So, in some part of France, dense enough to still have large apartment blocks but within a couple-minutes car ride of the rural part of the country, that infant, Linda (Melinée Leclerc), has grown to age eight, and in the interim acquired the ability to be a constant source of frustration and obstruction for her widowed mother Paulette (Clotilde Hesme), for instance continually "borrowing" the emerald ring her dead husband gave her because, I think it's fair to say, she covets that sentimental memory for herself. Paulette does, however, misjudge her child. Having berated her, even slapped her, and sent her to cool her heels at her aunt Astrid's (Laetitia Dosch's) for a night, for the crime of trading the missing ring to a school chum, Paulette belatedly realizes it was actually just ingested by their fat, gluttonous cat. Apologetic in the extreme, Paulette promises Linda whatever her heart desires to make it up to her. It strikes me that Linda would ask for the ring at this juncture, but instead she merely asks for chicken and peppers, the meal her father choked on and I presume, therefore, not a favorite of Paulette's—she's also extremely stressed out about the prospect of cooking something at all—but, nevertheless, it's a request that you'd think could be readily granted. Unfortunately, there's a big multi-sector strike (it's France) and Paulette has purchased neither chicken nor peppers, and she promised it today, so instead of breaking her promise to her little girl, she attempts to negotiate the sale of a chicken from the son of some farmers, and when he refuses to sell, she steals that still very-much-alive chicken anyway. Eventually Paulette winds up being chased by cops and by her angry, resentful sister while she and Linda resolutely chase a chicken that, being alive, keeps getting away from them.
For a not-inconsiderable amount of the movie—despite a very svelte runtime of 73 minutes (even svelter than The Girl Without Hands)—I was tapping my foot waiting for it to even actually start; for a longer amount of time, I was as frequently enervated by it as enchanted by its madcap little comic caper. Going on fifteen minutes, "the desire to kill and consume a bird" is not the animating impulse of the story, and there simply is not much in the way of "animating impulse" at all; it's setting and resetting the stage with most of its characters and defining the relationship between Paulette and Linda and that sounds perfectly fine, but it's the kind of naturalistic slice of life stuff that tends to have a failure mode of boredom (I'm not sure it quite gets there, but it consistently threatens), and the movie seemed to me to be posing the disagreeable question of whether I'd ever have consented to watch it, or if anybody would have given a shit, if it weren't a cartoon—that's the blunter way of saying I wondered if it had value beyond its style, or if the style alone were sufficient to maintain my interest in it (it is, but we'll get to that) despite finding the characters and story somewhat inaccessible and unlikeable, to the extent "characters and story" exist yet, and aren't an excuse to very Frenchly drop a (superbly visualized!) car ride through a dark night that begins with Linda asking her mother if they're dead, and which spills out into a semi-philosophical discussion of the ontological validity of human memory, even if something's gone and even if the memory is, itself, faded.
The second and more thoroughgoing problem, even once it essentially resets itself into zany comedy, is that the zany comedy requires some shockingly incompetent people to power it, and I found it frustrating, for example, that Paulette seems utterly incapable of extinguishing a chicken that was already tame enough to be stolen (she goes back out seeking her yoga instructor sister's assistance with this termination, which is the only way the chase phase that picks up an inept rookie cop (the mononymic Estéban, whoever that is) and a lovestruck truck driver (Patrick Pineau) even happens), and at turns I had some serious literalist objections to the proceedings even if this is, after all, a cartoon (I could be wrong about this, but I'd be extremely wary of using a blowtorch to unshackle a prisoner in steel cuffs, for various reasons; and I know for a miserable Goddamn fact that watermelons do not bounce). As for that ill-fated chicken, I found it weirdly irritating that, in this movie that's unusually willing to acknowledge that the meat you eat was once a living organism, it doesn't take the usual cowardly option a cartoon would take, regarding how to treat this gruesomeness, only so it can take a different and arguably more cowardly option instead. I also made a mental note to question how good someone who feels overwhelmed by the prospect of just cooking a meal would be at, you know, butchering that meal: I mean, I know how to kill a chicken, for any human being outside of the characters in this film could figure that out, but past that point, it's pretty theoretical, and given the general satire of urbanism that Chicken For Linda! gets up to, I don't think I'd trust any meal these people made, farm-to-table.
And then there's a musical number (the film has a few, in a "nondiegetic pop song dream montage" vein), clumsily coming right before the end, and Chicken For Linda! is maybe the most unaccountable movie I've seen from 2024 as a result of it—it's not even an especially good song—in that I spent pretty much all of it annoyed by it, or at least prepared to resume being annoyed by it even when it was actually prosecuting its chase comedy successfully, and that sort of got washed away by an unexpected imposition of an emotional resolution to a film where the emotional resolution probably ought to have always been fairly obvious, so that I clearly recall being aggravated, without feeling that aggravation all that keenly anymore. (I strongly suspect a rewatch would be a smoother ride.)
And until then, we do have that style, which is awfully smart even past how colorful and lovely it is, and probably lovelier, as a work of pop art that you get good feelings from looking at (regardless of what story it's telling and how), than Girl Without Hands was, though fundamentally it's only putting Laudenbach's aesthetic priorities to use for different purposes than his last film. The very basic thing about it remains entirely recognizable, this being the digitally brushstroked lines that are most broadly comparable to traditional East Asian brush art but bent towards more "very little kid's storybook" ends here (or maybe "animation such as you might find at the beginning of a dubious 60s megacomedy" ends), even as the level of graphic abstraction has decreased, all those lines still quite okay with you noticing that they're digital, though they still want you to feel the human handicraft behind them. And then the color comes in, which is where we start departing from Girl Without Hands, and the characters are all just solid swatches of digital color, that also wants you to think of human handicraft, complete with a faked instability to these colors to match the less-faked instability of the lines that I'm quite enamored with. (The only "character," at least besides a friend who briefly wears a yellow hat that yellow Linda wants to borrow, who isn't a solid color is, I believe, the cat. That's because the cat is purple but his anus is pink, and no, I'm not especially enamored with the extremely try-hard dimensions of meticulously ensuring that a cat's anus is the single most stable element of an entire cartoon, especially when there's a dog in the movie, too, and the black slash designating "this dog's collar" is allowed to vanish at random, right in between fucking animated frames.)
Anyway, it's in interaction with some just outright scrawled backdrops, and if all we got to was "child's crayon drawing" it would already be something—just the way this cartoon's animation elements and background elements feel more unified than maybe any cartoon I've ever seen—and while that's a pretty good reduction of what it's achieving, it's worth probing a little further. It's not "color coding," exactly—Linda is yellow and her mom is orange (and her dad was red and her aunt is pink), and there's some level of familial correlation throughout, but "coding" as symbolism probably tops out at "cops are blue"—but it gets at childhood perception, or, alternatively, recollections of childhood perceptions. Not, at least not directly, childhood emotions—again, there's no real color symbolism—but simply the way that everything seen through a child's eyes is likely to be the bluntest, flattest, and most readily-understood version of itself, and fuzzy around the edges. Even so, that surely plays into how the film is treating with childhood emotions, with Linda being almost nothing but an impatient yellow bag of want, and an intellect devoted solely to determining the most direct path between her and the object of her want. She's a fairly shitty child, honestly, as I expect most children are (I sure was), with any more sophisticated emotions being very thinly comprehended, if they're present at all. She's not sullen or grief-stricken, she barely knows she should be, and that's left to her mother, whom Linda is not apt to recognize as sullen or grief-stricken or having needs of her own, and whom we can, it's true, make out as a fairly shitty mom, albeit because she's been driven to irrationality by the horribly unfair hand she's been dealt, and by alternatively attempting to deflect or satisfy the bottomless, unreasonable desires that are the only emotional requirements it appears that Linda even has. But then, I guess that's what parental love is. (And I rather enjoy the parallel between Linda and Paulette when we get to see how Astrid has perceived her younger sister, in part, maybe, just because Astrid is the easiest person in the film to enjoy.)
And so it's kind of tough, ultimately very sweet, and it's mostly funny even if it's not particularly clever in its comic scaffolding, and has some considerable trouble threading the needle of idiot farce as a genre. But it's always beautiful, predominantly in the garish, childish ways I've described, yet there are outright haunting passages, of color in darkness in the black of the night while the mother and daughter discuss death, or the gesture that kicks the movie off, of memories floating up through Linda's mind's eye and asking to be honored.
Score: 7/10
*Though the arrangement of the credits—directed by, Laudenbach and Malta, written by, Malta and Laudenbach—is at least highly suggestive.
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