Being a single mother—or a widow, as is the case here—means having to make many balances.. Life, it seems, is not designed for dysfunctional family units, and the universe of Linda and Paulette, her mother, will become completely unpredictable when her wedding ring, for which her daughter has a special fixation, goes missing.
The French Sebastien Laudenbach had already attracted attention on the festival circuit with The young girl without mains, a delicate foray into the stories of the Grimm brothers which also went through the FICX. Now, together with Chiara Malta, with whom they already signed the short film with four hands Come azure in 2020, they bring us Linda wants chicken! a crazy and colorful banquet of animation that only asks us to be children again for a while.
‘Linda wants chicken!’: review
I hope all feel-good movies possessed some of the charm of this first animated feature by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach. The unstoppable succession of entanglements and setbacks that propels the film forward may seem light or overly friendly at times, but It is drawn so gracefully that one cannot take one’s eyes away from the screen.
The invocation of memory during the credits makes us think for a moment about Alain Resnais; Shortly afterwards we learn that an imminent general strike is going to take place and we wonder if this will be a film about the workers’ struggle.
And it still is, in a way. Is under all, a film about the ties that unite a small community, in which everything is turned upside down by little Linda’s determination to eat chicken with peppers, the delicacy that she feels her mother owes her after falsely accusing her of stealing her blessed ring. The strike prevents them from buying chicken at the supermarket, and the story also features the void left by her father and the frustrations of a mother who cannot cope.
The harshness of existence will be momentarily silenced by an adventure as eventful as those of Jacques Tati. We may also remember that movie Sylvain Chomet, Welcome to Belleville, although the style of Laudenbach and Malta is clearly more restless and avant-garde; The person who writes this was captivated by the way in which night and darkness are represented, achieving small inspirational prints fauvist through working with color.
Youtube It is rapidly colonizing the time and imagination of the little ones, that from there they jump to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At the risk of sounding paternalistic, I will say that certain animation products are so dull that they justify by themselves the existence of happy and colorful manifestos like the one outlined Linda wants chicken! whose celebration of affections and cures It suffers from a final stretch that is too complacent.
Something, by the way, that we could talk about another day is the fact that the macguffin of the film is the to kill or not to kill to a poor chicken.
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