Forget your troubles and get a suicide kit

This is an unusual charmer that won't work for everyone, especially not in the non-French world: an animated musical about suicide. Elaborate and clever subtitles do a wonderful job but wordplay and meaning tend tolost something when song lyrics are converted into another language. It's also in 3D, though as mostly happens, the necessity of this is obscure. What delights are the elaborate backgrounds, particularly the shop itself, with its endless arrays of poisons, ropes to hang yourself of every possible material, organic or hi-tech, the weaponry including knives -- and one for seppuku, "Hari-kiri in slang," as we're helpfully told by the pointedly named pater familias, the mustachioed Michima (Bernard Alane). His wife's got a cute name too, Lucrèce (Isabelle Spade). What happens is that a new child is born into the family and this little boy is incurably happy. His irrepressible smiles, so inappropriate in dealing with the depressed and suicidal, are destined to change his family's world forever. The amazing Kacey Mottel Klein shines, as usual as the voice of Alan, the little boy who can't wipe the smile off his face. It's as if Charlie Brown were born into the Addams family. The story is set at an indeterminate time in a generic big city (it looks more like New York than Paris). The shop is licensed, but clients are warned to off themselves out of sight: public suicides, attempted or successful, are subject to a fine. If they're successful, family members are liable. The Suicide Shop has excellent momentum. It's a ridiculously cheerful twittering machine that never stops.

Patrice Leconte is a French director whose films have frequently been well received abroad. These include Monsieur Hire, The Hairdresser's Husband, The Girl on the Bridge ,The Widow of Saint-PIerre, and The Man on the Train. This is indeed a change of pace, and it works. The trick of it is its buoyancy. Even though the family maintain a dour facade in dealing with their clientele and are shocked and annoyed at Alan's irrepressible joie-de-vivre, they go about their work with enthusiasm, and the film is never a downer. Based on the novel by Jean Teulé and with the voices of Bernard Alane, Isabelle Space, Klein, Isabelle Giami, and Laurent Gendron.

The Suicide Shop/Le magazin des suicides, 105 mins., was screened as part of the joint Unifrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (Feb. 28-Mar. 10, 2013), which constituted the film's New York premiere. The French release was September 26, 2012 (1h 25min), when the film was received with mild enthusiasm. The Allociné press rating was 3.1, based on 23 reviews. Some critics weren't sold and thought this is only faux Gothic (we might say ersatz Edward Gorey), and this is maybe partly true: Leconte et al. have not quite got to the source of tongue-in-cheek melancholia. If the theme appeals it's very watchable, though.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.