The Map of My Dreams

Ten-year-old T.S. Spivet (Kyle Catlett) lives with his family on a ranch in the middle of nowhere Montana. While his sister Gracie (Niamh Wilson) dreams of life in the big city and the participation in a beauty contest, his mother Dr. Clair (Helena Bonham Carter) is primarily concerned with insects and he also to his taciturn father (Callum Keith Rennie), a real cowboy, can not establish a real bond, T.S. only remains to escape into his own world. And in this world, the highly gifted boy makes such ingenious inventions that one day even the famous Smithsonian Museum invites him to Washington D.C. to award him a prize. Secretly, the boy sets off on the long journey to the capital and experiences one exciting adventure after another. But he cannot run away from the dark secret he carries with him, even on his journey across the USA.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's films are always characterised by a very special visual language and a visual playfulness. But as we all know, even the most beautiful and imaginative images do not make a good film. Fortunately, the French filmmaker is also a true artist as a storyteller. Jeunet has a first-rate ability to make small things seem very big and to discover true beauty even in the dark corners of his stories. This is also evident in his second English-language film after Alien - The Rebirth in an impressive and fascinating way. The film adaptation of Reif Larsen's bestseller The Map of My Dreams, also Jeunet's first 3D film, is an imaginative, humorous, simultaneously sad, beautiful and delightfully quirky road trip through the USA that offers quite great cinema on both a visual and narrative level.

Shot primarily in Canada, Jeunet has captured some quite magnificent landscape shots, which in the 3D version reveal a depth in which you can literally lose yourself as a viewer. Besides these beautiful pictures, the way Jeunet visualizes the very special world of T.S. Spivet's thoughts makes the film a feast for the eyes and at the same time offers some wonderfully bizarre ideas that not only amaze but also make you laugh. This creates a pleasant counterbalance to the very sad aspects of the story. Not only because of his passion for science, but also because of the secret that has been weighing on his conscience for far too long, T.S. is also very lonely within his family. And this makes for very moving moments, in which some viewers might even shed a tear or two.

Particularly the scene in which T.S. reveals his tragic secret to the world at the award ceremony in Washington is a real goosebump moment, thanks to the perfect interplay of Jeunet's staging, the wonderful music by Denis Sanacore and the outstanding performance by newcomer Kyle Catlett. It is here that the film reveals another of Jeunet's strengths: as much of a visual director as he may be, he never lets the images upstage the performances of the actors. Rather, he relies on a balanced symbiosis, which pays off in full in The Map of My Dreams.

This wonderful film is a reminder of what cinema is actually made for. Here, neither the special effects nor the 3D visuals are used simply to bombard the audience's senses, but they are an important part of a simply beautiful story that invites laughter, sobbing and dreaming in equal measure. So if you want to experience great cinema for all your senses and love extraordinary stories, you should definitely take T.S. on a journey to Washington. Absolutely worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp