Edinburgh 2010: The Illusionist

The Illusionist, by Sylvain Chomet, is an odd choice for an opening-night festival film, since it's a film about letting go. It's an animated adaptation of one of the late French comedian Jacques Tati's most personal unmade scripts, and though it's quite a light, breezy movie, and one that makes a virtue of its simple, sketchy style, The Illusionist leaves a surprisingly deep impression. Luckily, guests at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival didn't have to suffer the modern environs of the Cineworld to see it: Chomet's poignant second animated feature premiered in the much more classy, and classical, Festival Theatre, a venue much better suited to its themes.

Personally, I never much liked Tati, but that's because I only ever saw Mr Hulot's Holiday, which drove me crazy as a kid. Lately, though, I've had an urge to look at his work a bit more closely (especially if I ever get a chance to see a 70mm projection of Play Time), and this film only feeds that curiosity. Chomet's film, I think, works as a terrific Tati primer, since it captures the style of his work but suffuses it with a sense of the man both as an artist and a human being. That Tati could never bring himself to shoot the film speaks volumes, and that his daughter, Sophie, could not bear to see it made as a live-action film – but still wanted it made – says even more.

The official line is that The Illusionist is a love letter from a father to a daughter, but I see it more as an apology, albeit a bumbled one, in which no actual words of regret are ever spoken. Well, no words are much spoken at all, since, like his breakthrough movie The Triplets Of Belleville, Chomet's film contains very little dialogue. It concerns a travelling magician, Tatischeff (Tati's real full name), who is finding life hard on the Parisian music hall circuit. The jugglers, the dancers and the clowns are being driven out by rock'n'roll, and television is keeping audiences at home, so Tatischeff embarks on a journey to Scotland, where he tries to find employment in the most remote areas, only to find that jukebox culture is literally following him to the middle of nowhere.

On his travels, Tatischeff meets a housemaid called Sophie, who follows him to the mainland, where he finds work in a crumbling Edinburgh revue hall. They move into low-rent digs, and Tatischeff finds it hard to say no to the naïve but demanding Sophie, who really does believe he conjures the gifts he showers her with – coats, dresses, shoes – out of thin air. Here, the film moves at quite a slow pace, with lots of quiet moments that sometimes make you wonder if this story will ever actually go anywhere, or whether it's just, literally, an artist's impress of an idea Tati once had. But when it starts to unfold, The Illusionist does create a pretty compelling narrative, in which this unwitting father figure must give his 'daughter' the freedom to get on with her own life.

In reality, Tati wasn't such a generous father at all. As well as Sophie, he also had an illegitimate child, named Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who didn't fare as well as his two legitimate offspring (Sophie and Pierre). Tati made Helga's mother sign a contract absolving him of all fatherly duties and effectively abandoned the pair of them. Helga's family have complained that The Illusionist is a film that airbrushes this other child out of existence, but I beg to differ. I think Chomet's film is a very complex and moving piece of work that quite explicitly addresses Tati's shortcomings. Tati was a beloved French artist, an icon who, despite his fame, suffered severe financial problems because the public that so loved him didn't necessarily want to see his films. To me, The Illusionist is about a man who can't quite measure up to the man his public thinks he is, prefers to dwell in the outskirts of his own life, and is never quite able to take the reins when he's needed. The more I hear about Tati, the more I think The Illusionist is the closest thing to a biopic we may ever see.