Cannes Review: Blaise is a deliriously funny comedy of errors

Cannes really upped their animation game this year, with at least seven animated features making their debut on the Croisette. While I'm not at the festival, I have the great pleasure of reviewing Jean-Paul Guigue and Dimitri Planchon's rapturously funny Blaise, which premiered in the ACID sidebar (which seeks to promote independent filmmaking) at the fest.

Based on a comic book and previously adapted as an animated series, Blaise is one of my favorite kinds of movies: one of those where small seeds of social awkwardness bloom into wild, unpredictable results. On the surface, this is the story of a very boring kid (the titular Blaise) and his strange parents. Each of the three are on their own journeys of self-discovery and -redefinition. They each have a skin they're trying to shed, all in the hopes of looking more x to a certain person or persons. The way this film is plotted is, in a word, delicious. It had me howling at the wild turns it takes, and the inability of the characters to get off the unnecessary ride that they themselves put in motion. It's one of those movies where you're like...this all could have been avoided, so easily. But thank goodness none of it was.

For his part, Blaise is really just kind of a blank canvas of a kid. He's sixteen, very quiet, and doesn't have much going on in his life. He gets dragged to a party where he catches the eye of wealthy Joséphine, who reads his silence as something deeper and more mysterious. Blaise tries on a new identity culled from details he's heard at the party: he's from a rough neighborhood, where he's the caretaker for his sickly mom. None of this is true. In turn, Joséphine wonders if her life of privilege will be off-putting to someone from the wrong side of the tracks, so she pretends to be from a poorer, working-class background. Together, they get swept up in protests against the president, inching ever closer to acts of violence in the name of change (that neither of them probably even particularly believe in, or at least care about).

Blaise's father, Jacques, is particularly pathetic (and therefore hilarious), wanting to prove to his wife's best friend that he's not a loser. Spoiler alert: he is. His entire journey in the film is trying to prove that he's a self-sufficient man, while consistently proving the opposite. Particularly delightful is how he uses the school's guidance counselor as a personal therapist, much to her chagrin. 

My favorite plot line comes courtesy of Blaise's mother, Carole, whose disposition has given her a reputation at work as being hard and cold. Newly assigned to the gravel and pebble department at the construction company where she works, she's determined to prove she's fun, warm, and agreeable. Her story shows the danger of social niceties, and how such cheaply spouted phrases can become thorn bushes from which we cannot escape. The way her story escalates is incredible, and leads to a truly outrageous outcome. 

Throughout all of these narrative threads, there's an overwhelming theme of miscommunication, whether purposeful or accidental. Against the politically charged backdrop of a populace at odds with their leadership, it's fascinating to see how this particular group of characters navigate the world, the identities they try on, the masks they wear, and the things that preoccupy them. There's clearly great social upheaval happening all around them, but they can barely get their heads out of their own asses to even notice. You can't let the detritus of violence -- whether targeted or incidental, even Chekhovian -- get in the way of your journey to meaning. Let the bodies hit the floor, and keep saying your piece.

The film's animation style is such a key part of Blaise working as well as it does as a commentary on our own short-sightedness and narcissism. The characters in this film look like they're molded from actual photographs, with certain features enlarged or carefully places to give an air of uncanniness. For those who watched Angela Anaconda, it's sort of of in that realm. The character designs thus end up occupying a weird space where there are ways in which they look realistic (say, if you're just looking at the mouth) but who look like caricatures when you take it all in together. It's such a strange and specific aesthetic, and one that's perfect for subject matter that lampoons the silliness of human behavior with such clear-eyed wit.

The film's music is also really fun, a vocals-heavy jazzy score that pops in to underline moments of peak stupidity. The ba-ya-yaaaahs and diddily-diddily-da-da-da-das have a zippy, playful energy that kind of reminded me of the interstitial music from Seinfeld or something like that. Actually, Blaise would work quite well as a Seinfeld episode when I think about it...a bunch of dummies making bad choices to hysterical effect.

Blaise is a brilliant satire that holds a mirror up to the world, and gleefully reveals how ridiculous we look when we stray from authenticity. It's been a while since a movie made me laugh this hard, or kept me guessing so much as to where it was going. I feel it captures the ways in which humans are utterly predictable but also impossible to predict, one of the contradictions of being alive that make being human so confounding, so weird, and (often) so funny.