Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Maryam OH visually charming is what comes to my mind when I think about Attila Marcel. it has an interestingly weird environment and characters. to me that's great! I liked the music and every visual element of the movie, color combinations, and decor, fascinated me. What I didn't like is that it had this annoying randomness the whole time, and some scenes were unnecessary which made me really bored at times while watching it. generally the story isn't that great, what is great is the sweetness of it. to sum it up it's a good choice for someone who wants something delightful but smart enough with a hint of imagination.

Tom Dooley Paul is in his thirties, he is mute having seen his parents die when he was but two. Since then he has been brought up by his fabulously eccentric aunts and has become something of a virtuoso on the piano. Then a fascinating neighbour tells him that she can help him by using a concoction of herbal tea.He soon starts to see this Madame Proust regularly and starts regression therapy of sorts. She says that 'you can drown bad memories in a flood of tiny joys' – which is sage advice indeed. The film deals with the cycle of life, the past and a host of human issues. What unfolds is a beautiful film in terms of style and sentiment about his life and those around him, with so much thrown in that it seems to be endlessly inventive. Guillaume Gouix as Paul and Attila (his wrestling father) is superb – even more so when you consider that he is unable to speak. Everyone plays their roles to the limit and no one goes over the top to lose believability. This is just a wonderful film with music, taxidermy, tree hugging and a whole lot of love besides – one for French film fans and for those who like something a bit different, but in a really nice way.

allenrogerj Sylvain Chomet's first live action film is another exercise in homage and hyper-reality. It is in the same kind of slightly off-kilter world as his other films, like, but not quite like, our own. Paul, an aging infant prodigy, has one last chance to win a prize for young pianists before he stops being officially young. He has been mute since his parents' mysterious deaths when he was two and was raised by his mother's staid sisters, Anna and Annie, dance teachers, who control his life and have made him practise continually on the family's ancestral piano in a flat full of ancestral portraits when he is isn't playing at their dance school. Escaping from his birthday party, attended by his aunts' elderly friends, Paul encounters Mme Proust, an aging ukulele-playing hippie with a huge black deaf dog and no aspirations to musical virtuosity, who uses exotic tisanes (accompanied by madeleines, of course) to revive Paul's childhood memories and bring closure, in the best Hollywood Freudian way, to his problems. There is a destiny that shapes our ends, she explains, rough-hew them how we will, and that is what it does to Paul.Paul's repressed memories appear from an infant's brightly-coloured p.o.v. to the accompaniment of music his aunts would abhor, including seductive jazz-playing frog accordionists. In the end, Paul is an integrated man, an acclaimed virtuoso (if not on the piano), able to speak, a good father who does not repeat his own father's mistakes... Like Chomet's earlier films, this is a game of references and hallucinations and just as animated as they were, if in a different way.

eduardo ramirez With only 2 films, Sylvain Chomet has become a reference in the field of animated cinema, due to his unique and original style. His third feature film, Attila Marcel, implies a radical change in his career, being his first live-action movie (although he already experienced in this field in one of the short films from Paris Je t'aime), however, his style and quirks permeate along it. Paul, a mute pianist since he was 2 years old because he witnessed the death of his parents, lives under the care of his aunts, a pair of single women who own a small dance school, and prepare him to compete in talent competitions. One day, by chance he meets Madame Proust, his downstairs neighbor, who runs a secret herbal business; intrigued by Paul's life circumstances, Mme. Proust decides to help him (via a mysterious herbal tea) to dig into their memories and traumas, in order to make him recover his voice. A recurrent theme in Chomet's short but substantial filmography is loneliness, this primarily through the orphanhood, and the need for bonds of affection that drive the protagonists to overcome adversity; in this case, Paul seems to find in Mme. Proust an outlet to a cold and mundane existence along with his aunts and takes him on an inner journey of self-rediscovery. This without falling into sentimentality or cheap sappiness, but with a very emotional forcefulness and a quirky sense of humor, which is Chomet's trademark, evident since his first short film (The Old lady and the pigeons) and exploited to the fullest in The Triplets of Belleville. The music is one of the aspects that Chomet has taken the best advantage of, to the extent that it becomes a prominent character of the story, as also happens in this movie; the piano plays a crucial role in the life of Paul, since it is the only mean of expression available for him before he meets Mme. Proust, who is curiously fond of the ukulele. In turn, some of the memories of Paul are manifested through curious and delirious musical numbers, which help Paul to find out a little more about the relationship between his parents before they died (and by the way, Chomet confirms his skill to create vigorous music and full of eccentric joy or a beautiful melancholy). However, what distinguishes Chomet from the rest is his great ability to tell stories without using words, or using a minimum amount, such as in Belleville or The Illusionist. And while Attila Marcel is not a silent film, the lead character is, and in many cases is difficult to achieve a balance that does not distract the viewer to notice the lack of dialogue (that means to make the viewer attracted to the story from the very start of the movie), which Chomet achieves effortlessly. This is where is necessary to highlight the performance of Guillaume Gouix as Paul, as he manages to create an almost instant empathy using a face and a look worthy of the golden age of silent films. Also Anne Le Ny deserves mention as Mme Proust, who provides a perfect counterbalance to Paul, being the opposite of him: outgoing, outspoken, not afraid to speak his mind, but as lonely as Paul and with her own emotional issues to deal with. In sum, Attila Marcel shows that the transition of animation directors to real action does not always equate to disastrous results, and is a somewhat modest but charming and stylish film exercise.