Screen Review 7: The Suicide Shop

Movie: The Suicide Shop
Director: Patrice Leconte
Run Time: 1h 19m
Release Date: September 26th, 2012
Stars: Bernard Alane, Isabelle Spade, Kacey Mottet Klein
Rated: n/a

Synopsis: Patrice Leconte adapts Jean Teulé's darkly comic 2007 novel into a animated musical concerning a young child with a sunny disposition born into a family that thrives on the misery of others. Since 1854, the Tuvache family has owned a small shop catering to the suicidal impulses of its depressed clientele. A walk down the shadowy isles of this morbid boutique reveals a dazzling variety of instruments with which weary shoppers can end their suffering. When pessimistic proprietor Mishima and his depressive wife give birth to a baby boy named Alan, they're overjoyed at the thought that he will be just as miserable as his somber siblings. But Alan isn't like the others; bright-eyed and energetic, he's a ghastly ray of sunshine in their cherished world of grey skies. Realizing that the very future of their enduring family business may be threatened by the beaming boy, the Tuvache's soon resort to desperate measures in their efforts to keep the misery alive.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

"Has your life been a failure? Let's make your death a success!"

Before I start this review, I should preface it with the fact that suicide is obviously terrible. This film makes light of the matter, but if you are suicidal you should seek help immediately. I would not recommend this film to anyone who has ever seriously suffered from suicidal thoughts or who has lost someone to suicide.

And now, onto the review about a family who helps people kill themselves.

The animation was clean and crisp, and really grew on me over the course of the film. I'll admit, the style is unconventional for a feature film, and that turned me off at first. The characters are completely 2-D, and often come off not as characters in their world but as paper dolls plastered onto painted backgrounds. I came to like the style though, since it really felt like it fit the comic morbidness of the story, and as the narrative progressed it didn't take me out of the world as much as it originally did. It probably only did at all due to the newness of the style to me.

I can't give a complete review on the music (this movie is a musical by the way), since it was all in French, but it did the job and sounded nice. I think the movie could really work as an on-stage adaptation, perhaps even better than it does animated.

The movie itself, however, outside the animation and music, was flawed. I felt like there were real pacing problems. This movie is only a bit above an hour in length, which really messed up the flow of the story. All of the songs are as long as you'd expect them to be in some 3-hour musical, so it's the character development and dialogue in between the songs that gets the ax. Parts of the story feel so rushed that, in turn, it starts losing some believability. Characters undergo major change with the flip of a switch, shrugging off mentalities they had held tight to for decades, largely because it seems like the plot needs them to so we could wrap this thing up.

That being said, I did like the base personalities of several of the characters. The father, main character, and sister (sorry I don't remember any of their names) all have interesting motivations and stories (if only they could be further developed in a realistic and unrushed way, or at all). It was interesting to see how being faced with such constant suicide and depression would affect a family's relationships with each other, and I wish there had been a more satisfying conclusion to their arcs.

The conclusion, in one word, was anticlimactic. Like I said before, and I'm really trying not to go into spoilers here, characters can't believably go through major changes "just because," and ruining someone's life usually doesn't work to motivate them to see things from your point of view.

The main thing that turned me off this movie, however, was this one scene right in the middle. HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILERS The main character, after gifting his sister a scarf and some music, gets his friends together in order to to watch through her bedroom window. There they see the sister dance a sexy, fully nude dance. The friends all sort of fall over in shock, but the brother stares on lovingly and remarks how beautiful his sister's naked form is. What?! There's a stereotype that the French had different standards for what's deemed sexual, and I've read many comments saying that the brother is just appreciating his sister's dancing and respecting her as a beautiful woman, but it's weird! It's a complete breach of privacy to watch someone through their window with your friends, and even more so if they're naked! The dance is very, very sexual, and constantly cutting to shots of the brother in awe of his sister's sexuality is so off-putting. Stop it with your implied incest and breaches of privacy movie! (Woah that rant was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.)

I don't know, this movie just missed the mark for me. I can understand the praise, but there were just so many little things that turned me off. Not bad enough for one star, but definitely enough to push it away from three.

-Claire