Dilili in Paris

Synopsis

During the Belle Époque, the little mixed race girl Dilili was part of a Kanak village set up in a Parisian public garden. Orel, a scooter driver, slips into the enclosure to meet Dilili, who finds him in the evening. She tells him her story: she has both European ancestors and Kanak ancestors, she was educated by Madame Michel (who is none other than Louise Michel), then on her arrival in Paris, she met a countess who taught her good manners. Orel offers Dilili a ride around Paris on his scooter while he makes his deliveries. Enthusiastic, Dilili discovers the streets and squares of Paris. They meet Marie Curie, to whom Orel had to bring her daughter Ève, then the singer Emma Calvé, friend of Orel, who likes to sing on the underground lake which extends under the Garnier Opera, as well as the writer Marcel Proust in the company of his friend Reynaldo Hahn. The little girl writes down in her notebook the names of the celebrities she meets and who give her all kinds of ideas for jobs she would like to do later. Very quickly, Dilili is intrigued by the announcements from newspaper sellers: little girls are regularly kidnapped by a network of bandits who sign their crimes under the name “Male-Masters”. Dilili immediately decides to investigate to find the missing girls. Herself the victim of a first kidnapping attempt in a public garden, she is saved by Orel.

The investigation leads Dilili and Orel to the Moulin du Diable, in Montparnasse, in the poor neighbourhoods where they are poorly received. They cross the fence, but are attacked by a rabid mastiff who bites Orel at the risk of transmitting the disease to him. Dilili puts Orel in the scooter and races back down the slope to the Pasteur Institute, where she begs Louis Pasteur to vaccinate Orel. Once the latter is out of danger, the investigation can resume. Pasteur and his entourage give new leads to the investigative duo. They then go to the boat wash, a building which houses many painters of the moment. There, they learn that the bandits regularly meet in front of the Moulin Rouge shows . Dilili meets Colette there, then the painter and poster artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who helps them spot two Male Masters. By eavesdropping on their conversation, Dilili learns that they are preparing to rob a jewelry store using equipment that one of the bandits will collect "at the gates of hell" . The two young detectives immediately go to the police, but no one believes them. Their painter friends direct them to the workshop of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, because the “gate of hell” is the name of one of his sculptures. Dilili admires a work by Camille Claudel there. When they arrive in the garden where the “door to hell” is located, the bandit is already there and Orel pursues him without success: as soon as he steps out into the street, the Male Master inexplicably disappears. However, they take their post to watch for the robbery around the jewelry store. Dilili distracts the bandit who stands guard, while Orel unharnesses the horse from his carriage. When the bandit responsible for the robbery comes out of the jewellery store, Dilili uses his skipping rope to entangle his legs and make him fall: his loot spills on the ground and the two bandits are arrested by the police. An admiring witness, who turns out to be the Prince of Wales passing through Paris, supports Dilili in the face of an unfriendly police officer.

Cast

Prunelle Charles-Ambron as Dilili

Enzo Ratsito as Orel

Natalie Dessay as Emma Calvé

Elisabeth Duda as Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, Élisabeth Greffulhe, Madeleine Lemaire

Olivier Voisin as Erik Satie

Liliane Rovère as Louise Michel

Bruno Paviot as Lebeuf, Louis Pasteur, The Lumière brothers, the sewerman

Jérémy Lopez as Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Poiret, Félix Vallotton, the Male-Master Coachman

Harrison Arevalo as Pablo Picasso

Thissa d'Avila Bensalah as Colette, Camille Claudel, Suzanne Valadon, Berthe Morisot

Michel Elias as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Constantin Brâncuși, Ernest Renan, the Male Master at the opera, the false old man, the impresario

Nicolas Planchais as Sergei Diaghilev, the Grand Male Master, Bancroche

Pascal Pestel as Amedeo Modigliani

Paul Bandey as Prince of Wales, future Edward VII

Isabelle Guiard as Sarah Bernhardt, Anna de Noailles, La Goulue, the mistress supervisor, the mother of the family

Karim M'Riba as Claude Debussy

Olivier Claverie as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Gustave Eiffel, Auguste Rodin, Georges Clemenceau, the police commissioner

Production

Development

Director, writer, and designer Michel Ocelot has said that two starting points for the production were his desire to create a work set in Paris, and an originally separate desire to create one on the topic of male suppression and abuse of women and girls.

He chose to combine these in a narrative which takes place in the Belle Époque, roughly in the 1900s, a decade in which several historical firsts for women in France were made.

The film depicts some of the many notable historical figures who were often present in the city at the time, and features a fictionalized version of the opera singer Emma Calvé as a supporting character. However, it simultaneously intentionally diverges from real history (and, as the director readily admits, laws of science) in its metaphorical main plot and inclusion of retrofuturist technology influenced by various works of Jules Verne and The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.

Animation production

The 3D rendering style continues in that used in Azur & Asmar, in that the fabric, hair, and so on of the three-dimensional models is rendered as solid colours with no shading, though it differs in that the characters' bodies (which in Azur & Asmar were shaded from a fixed angle, in a style inspired by late medieval art) are defined with a tracing effect developed from that used in Kirikou and the Men and Women.

The scenery incorporates photographs, taken by Ocelot over four years, of structures which survive from the depicted era or earlier, including the Palais Garnier, Bouillon Racine, Maxim's and the Paris sewers and objects from the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, Musée de l'École de Nancy, Musée Carnavalet, Musée Rodin, Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, and Musée Marmottan Monet, which are used directly as two-dimensional elements or for texture mapping rather than as reference material. Others were recreated in three dimensions, including the Eiffel Tower, which was based directly on architectural drawings from Gustave Eiffel's company. The digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica, was used for research and for two-dimensional empherea that were incorporated directly.

Unlike Ocelot's two previous feature films, Tales of the Night and Kirikou and the Men and Women, Dilili has not been released in stereoscopic 3D.

Release

In North America, the film was released in cinemas in Quebec on 21 December 2018 by Axia Films and on video on demand throughout Canada by them on 7 March 2019, in both instances in French with no English options. It was released in cinemas in the United States and English-speaking Canada on 4 October 2019 by Samuel Goldwyn Films, with an English-language dub.

In Australia, the film was played in cinemas as part of the 30th Alliance Française French Film Festival, which ran from 5 March to 18 April 2019 in 9 cities across the country, and it was released on DVD and video on demand in Australia and New Zealand on 10 July 2019 by Madman Entertainment, in both instances in French with English subtitles only.

In China, the film was selected for competition at the 2019 Shanghai International Film Festival.

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 67% of 27 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.6/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 37 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.

Accolades

At the 4th International Historical Fiction Film Festival, held in Plaisance-du-Touch in September 2018, Dilili won the Press Award for Best Feature Film. On 4 February 2019 at the 24th Lumière Awards it won Best Animated Film, and on 22 February 2019 at the 44th César Awards it won the César Award for Best Animated Feature.