LOUIS CLICHY: IRON BOY/LE CORSET (2026) - MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL
Farm boy with handicap plays great cathedral organ.
Poor little boy! He certainly gets jerked around in this animated film from Belgium. It's the 1980's in the fertile north-central French agricultural region of la Beauce, where Chartres Cathedral is located. This is an animation using Chinese ink brushes and watercolors, a soft look, easy on the eyes, quite unlike the hard dimensionality of Pixar, though the director worked at Pixor for a while, on three major films, Ratatouille (2007), WALL·E (2008), and Up (2009). Great years! But surely Clichy is much more himself here.
The boy is blond. His name is Christophe. He is voiced by the director's son, Gary. Other voices are of people in the farm country, recorded in the field. There is a girl, Clara (Brune Moulin), and the film works in a romance.
Christophe's older brother is voiced by Rod Paradot. That brought back fond memories of the boy snatched from a carpentry apprenticeship to act in 2015's Standing Tall/La tête haute, a film with Catherine Deneuve, Benoît Magimel and Sara Forestier, who became a surprise hit and won acting awards for the young Paradot, who wept and gasped in his memorably emotional César acceptance speech.
Early on, Christophe shows a tendency to suddenly "pencher," to lean down to one side. Said to be due to scoliosis, it's like he cannot hold himself up, and it causes accidents and disruptions. I never quite understood why it was decided to strap him into a stiff brace encasing much of his body with a metal device extending up to the chin. But you know how primitive corrective orthopedics was in the eighties. It's not questioned. Christophe gets laced up in the "corset" day and night, instructed to sleep in it too. At school having laughed at his troubles from the first, they now start to call him "Robocop," and he becomes an outsider, striving on his hardships on his own.
The farm of Christophe's father is in difficulties and the boy, the smaller brother, is pressured to help out. This includes perilous tractor rides, one of which wrecks the tractor. It's all an adventure that might be prohibitive to film live but can be done easily in animated form.
Much of the film is proccupied with the boy's development as an organist. He reveals musical talent and is trained by Michel (Alexandre Astier), who uses him as a page-turner at first, then lets him play, and later takes him to bigger churches and bigger organs, with Chartres Cathedral towering over them all and the flat terrain of la Beauce.
This is a charming and very French film. There are not many of the high notes not touched on, pun intended. This is a story of adversity overcome, of coming of age, of budding talent, apprenticeship, love, family values, economic hardship - much to be moved by and much to like. A little conventional, perhaps, this is nonetheless a splendid addition to the animated literature. A success and highly recommended.
Iron Boy/Le Corset,, 90 mins., premiered at Cannes Un Certain Regard. Also Annecy, Angoulême, TIFF, Leipzig, NYFF, BFI London, and other fests. In the US from Sony Pictures Classics. Metacritic rating: 84%.