I borrowed the CD of the score to Belleville Rendez-Vous from my girlfriend yesterday and just finished a sampling of tracks. What a film!

Sylvain Chomet's animated fantasia, Belleville Rendez-Vous (The Triplets of Belleville in the US), sent my mind whirling about for language to describe my sense of elation. Despite the stunning visuals, precisely observed bits of character, and sly plotting, I most remember the way my body squirmed in my theatre seat to the syncopated beat of the title tune. Music propels the film from set-piece to set-piece and resonates soundly against the beauty of the pictures. The film explicitly references Jacques Tati but it also strongly reminds me of Jeunet and Caro in the splendid freedom of its imagery.

Warm lines of pen, ink, and paint sketch the story of Madame Souza, her son with a Tour de France obsession, and their dog, Bruno. The son is kidnapped by some Mafioso and brought to the American/Canadian city of Belleville for participation in something like illegal dog races. The disgorging of the plot takes the form of a chase as Madame Souza attempts to rescue her son from an early demise at the hand of the Mafia. The son's somnambulistic routine of eating and cycling seem not far removed from his kidnapped existence. What really is Madame Souza saving her son from for which he isn't already fated?

So many threads of this film beg a proper analysis and discussion. The design evokes the familiar clichés about France and America, but does not pastiche them per se. Brilliant little tweaks to the established reality of things reward the viewer with familiar yet jarring images - frog kebabs, iceberg-shaped ships, grotesquely fat Americans, Belleville looking like a hybrid, deco Mont St. Michel / Manhattan, huge-shouldered gangsters, and so on ...

My favourite caricature? The obsequious, fawning Maitre'd. Can one be actively limp? Sent me into giddy belly-laughs - Hee!

The sound design perfectly accents the visuals. The crunching of muscles as the mother kneads her son's cycle-pumped thighs or a frog fried on the rails outside the triplets' seedy flat. The jazz baby title music unifies the disparate hallucinations as they fly by. The triplets themselves appear to be a cross between the witches of Macbeth crossed with the Andrews Sisters. The transformation of everyday objects into riotous musical instruments during their latter-day performance was a joyful surprise, indeed.

I've always been fascinated by the relationship between sound and image. As a child, I adored radio plays and their various techniques for evoking a mental image based on sound. I also obsessed over film music of all style and manner. Live orchestral music always knocks my senses into the stratosphere whenever I am fortunate enough to experience it. Something about tonal complexity, tension, and resolution brings me to an ecstatic place. I forever crave that ravishing of the senses that immersive artistic experiences offer.

Belleville Rendez-Vous brought me to a place very much like that.