A Magnificent Life

Screening as part of French Film Festival. 

In Sylvain Chomet’s animation A Magnificent Life, French playwright, filmmaker, and inventor Marcel Pagnol at 61 appears very close to giving up on his career, so a younger Marcel comes to the rescue. When asked to write a memoir, Pagnol simply can’t do it– not without the help of hope and optimism personified in the figure of young Marcel.

Like most biopics, the animation pays tribute to its subject, making Pagnol a man at ease with the times, embracing the medium of cinema when his theatre colleagues were too sceptical to try. The director of The Triplets of Belleville dons rose-tinted spectacles.