"Hugo"

[stapsdoes101things]

Last night I went to the cinema for the first time in ages, to see Hugo, Martin Scorsese's latest (only?) attempt at a children's movie. I will not tell a lie: I went because there are a whole three shots of my beloved 3267 (above) in it. The film is set in 1920s Paris and, while 3267 actually dates from 1935, there are few better ways to portray the City of Light between the wars than to have a Renault TN trundle through the background.

Since the action largely happens within an unspecified railway station (more likely to be Montparnasse than anything else, but isn't) one doesn't see much of her, but I counted at least three shots: the back end (I think my father and brother might have been in shot too, but would have to see it again) when a small boy is put in a police van, a side view shortly afterwards, and, when Hugo and Isabelle are on their way to the cinema, you see her nose.

Gricing aside, however, it was a thoroughly good film and I am extremely pleased that I went to see it - and at the cinema and in 3D, no less. I knew that it was based on a book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which I hadn't read; I knew that it was set in 20s Paris; and I knew that it involved a little boy who lived in a station.

What I didn't realise was that it was also a beautiful homage to the form of film itself, that it was chock-full of lovely clockwork stuff, that it had some wonderful things to say on the themes of vocation, burnination, and things that do what they're meant to, and that it was a glorious fix-it for the depressing end of Georges Méliès, the pioneer of what we'd now recognise as sci-fi film. I didn't know much about him before watching From the Earth to the Moon (highly recommended if you're at all interested in the NASA space programme, by the way, or a fan of Tom Hanks, or both), but his story occupies the final episode of that series. It's a sadly familiar one: the under-appreciated artist reduced to poverty. Hanks was mostly interested in Un Voyage Dans La Lune, for obvious reasons; I dragged countertony along to the cinema, and he perked up as soon as Hugo described the picture of the Man in the Moon with the rocket stuck in his eye. And, looking at Wikipedia, it seems that Hugo is not so much of a fix-it as I thought: Méliès did receive the Légion d'Honneur.

I felt that watching it in 3D also added a lot. It wasn't so much the ferocious guard dog and swinging pendulums bursting out of the screen, effective though that was, that felt exciting, as much as the nod to cinematic innovation. We were reminded that the first cinema-goers were so afraid that a train was coming out of the screen towards them that they screamed; I think Scorsese was trying to regain some of that excitement, and point out what he was doing at the same time. Very post-modern, but yes, effective.

Short version: very good film, plays shamelessly on everything that gets me. Highly recommended, though you'd probably best not watch it with me unless you are really interested in Paris buses. (But why would you not be?)