Movies: Le Portrait de Petite Cossette

One day Kurahashi’s uncle sends him a shipment of things to sell in the shop, and among them is a glass goblet with a curious play of colors along its surface. When he peers into it, he’s suddenly struck by a vision — “like a documentary film” — of a young girl living in a giant mansion. He sketches her as he sees her — sometimes playing a spinet, sometimes nodding off outside on a chaise longue. And then one night as he’s closing up shop he hears her voice speaking to him from the portrait he created, and is drawn into a nightmare vision of him stabbing her to death and then drinking her blood.

Who is she? He discovers a painting of her with an inscription: “To Cossette d’Auvergne, with love, Marcelo Orlando.” Later, he sees her in the flesh, in a customer’s house, when no one else can, and is drawn into a fantasy world dominated by more nightmarish visions of blood and suffering. By degrees it becomes clearer to him that she has been the victim of a terrible curse, one which extends itself to everyone who cares for her, and … well, without ruining too much more, I will say that reincarnation and curses and the souls of objects and a whole host of other ideas have been included without much regard for the way the audience is supposed to appreciate them as a whole.

I sometimes give writing workshops at conventions, and one of the golden rules I lay on people is to avoid unwarranted complexity in a story. Most of the people I meet want to start by writing these hideously involved mega-epics that span generations and have genealogy charts that fold out from the endpapers. It’s not just that they’re frustrating to the writer — and most of the time the writer gives up before he ever reaches Chapter Three — but frustrating to the reader. Stories are not about comings and goings and coincidences and conditions and labyrinthine developments. They are about people in conflict, and those conflicts (and those people) need to be direct and coherent for them to be interesting.

This is what’s wrong with Cossette. It’s not that the story isn’t worth telling, but the story that’s worth telling has been tricked up with so much unneeded baggage — metaphorical, conditional, psychological, you name it — that you practically have to reverse-engineer the goings-on to make sense of it, let alone connect with it. It doesn’t help that the most critical parts of the story are explained (if that’s the right word) in pretentious, torturously constructed language, and leave the audience bewildered instead of enlightened. The story is about situations and logic, not people and emotions. (It didn’t come as much of a surprise for me to discover that the director, Akiyuki Shinbo, was also responsible for Twilight of the Dark Master, one of the most unpleasantly incoherent anime I’ve ever had the bad luck to watch. This is a step up from that, but only a small one.)

One complaint I cannot lodge with Cossette is that it is uninteresting to look at. Every frame’s been put together with enormous care and attention; conventional hand-drawn animation, CGI and what look like painterly renditions of real-life scenes are all combined in striking ways. Unfortunately, the barrage of images is so overwrought and the explanations behind their existence are so hard to make head or tail of that what’s lovely after twenty minutes turns leaden and uncompelling after two hours. Cossette is one of those movies where the making-of is almost certainly more interesting than the film itself.