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The post Chicken for Linda!: Fowl Adventure, by Scott Nye appeared first on Battleship Pretension.
“Simple task becomes wholly complicated” is a tried-and-true storytelling approach going back to slapstick two-reelers. We all, to some degree, feel like life is too much of a bother as it is, and any attempt to go the extra mile becomes an insurmountable task. Seeing that reflected in a vast state of absurdity will always hit an audience where they live. Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s Chicken for Linda! takes a simple premise – to make up for unfairly punishing her daughter, a single mother goes on an elaborate mission to make their favorite meal her late husband made – and explodes it into a colorful, thrilling, and very sweet adventure.
Linda (Mélinée Leclerc) is an ordinary young girl, maybe ten or eleven, whose fixation on a ring her father left to her mother Paulette (Clotilde Hesme) inadvertently causes a rupture between them when Paulette suspects Linda of giving it away. Sending Linda to her sister Astrid’s (Laetitia Dosch), Paulette enjoys a rare night out, until she returns home and finds the ring was simply misplaced, not intentionally lost. In an effort to make it up to her, Paulette offers anything she can, and Linda chooses chicken and peppers, a meal her father made and to which she is understandably attached.
This covers the first twenty minutes or so of a very short film (the credits come up just after seventy-one minutes), which could easily have been a realist film in the style of the Dardenne brothers, save for the fact that this is an animated film whose style sketches the characters more than details them, and distinguishes them by associating a strong, vibrant color with each (Linda is yellow, Paulette orange, Astrid pink, etc.). One wonders whether this will transform into something only animation can capture or remain slightly minimalist and elemental, either of which would be fine.
When they wake up the next morning and set out for chicken, however, they find a general strike is in place – mass transit is out of service and all the grocery stores are closed. One fowl farm theft later and they are quite literally off to the races. An adolescent farmer, a rookie cop, a watermelon truck driver with a feather allergy, his mother, and a whole neighborhood of other assorted characters gradually pile onto their quest for a simple dinner.
Laudenbach and Malta have each made a feature prior, though not together. The one short they collaborated on, “A comme Azur,” is a mix of live action and animation. Wherever their sensibilities collided, they emerge here as a fully-defined filmmaking duo, with a strong sense of style that’s immediately gripping and a clean-but-not-overly-tidy approach to storytelling. Each character has not only their own color and physical shape (Linda and Paulette’s height do the work there, but single Astrid is lithe to working-mother Paulette’s plump figure, the cop is tall and lanky, the driver short and stout, and so on), but a distinct personality evident within their first few lines of dialogue. Some of this can be expedient at the expense of depth, but it’s a film that welcomes profundity without seeking it. Its contentedness with exploring the rift and development of familial and social relationships is central to its charm.
The post Chicken for Linda!: Fowl Adventure, by Scott Nye first appeared on Battleship Pretension.
The post Chicken for Linda!: Fowl Adventure, by Scott Nye appeared first on Battleship Pretension.
