THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADÈLE BLANC-SEC

 

Publicity poster for The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (© Luc Besson/EuropaCorp – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Given the choice of viewing a foreign-language movie that has been dubbed into English or has been supplied with English subtitles, I would always choose the former option, as I hate having to take my eyes off the movie almost continuously in order to read the subtitles. Not so long ago, however, I watched a couple of French movies of the latter type that were so riveting I scarcely even noticed myself glancing down at the subtitles. The films in question were The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (reviewed by me below) and Micmacs (reviewed by me here).

As I was soon to find out, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is nothing if not aptly entitled, including as it does the unlikely likes of a giant revitalized pterodactyl and an entire court of revived Egyptian mummies!

Directed by celebrated French director/producer/screenwriter Luc Besson, who also wrote its screenplay, and released by EuropaCorp in 2010, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec combines the plots of two separate comics produced by comic-book graphic artist Jacques Tardi, respectively entitled Adèle and the Beast (1976) and Mummies on Parade (1978), both featuring Tardi's fearless heroine Adèle Blanc-Ser as their lead character, and incorporates them within a basic plot devised by Besson. This means that the movie, mostly set in the early second decade of 20^th-Century Paris, contains two initially quite separate storylines that subsequently converge to amusing but also sometimes confusing effect.

One of these sees the movie's eponymous adventuress (played with spirited, glamorous éclat by Louise Bourgoin), who is a well known journalist and travel writer, seeking amid Egypt in best intrepid Indiana Jonesian fashion the mummy of Patmosis, apparently the personal medical doctor to the great pharaoh Rameses II. Despite some hairy encounters with her deadly, goblinesque rival Prof. Dieuleveult (Mathieu Amairic) during this search, Adèle ultimately succeeds in uncovering Patmosis's mummy and returning safely with it to Paris, where she hopes that the brilliant but eccentric and decidedly etiolated scientist Prof. Espérandieu (Jacky Nercessian) can revive it.

The reason why Adèle wishes this to happen is that when much younger, she accidentally incapacitated her sister Agatha during a game of tennis. So she now hopes that Patmosis possesses superior medical knowledge from the ancient Egyptian civilization that he can employ to free Agatha from her ongoing comatose state and restore her to her former fully-active, cognisant self.

Unknown to Adèle, however, is that while she had been seeking Patmosis's mummy in Egypt, Espérandieu's arcane experiments in telepathy and telekinesis had somehow resulted in his successful hatching of a fossil pterodactyl egg in Paris's Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy – in turn engendering all manner of chaos and carnage across the city after this predatory prehistoric beast had rapidly grown to full size and escaped. Accordingly, Espérandieu had been arrested and was now facing imminent execution. So if Patmosis is to be revived, Espérandieu needs to be rescued, while a motley assortment of oddballs and incompetents is adding even further to the melée of mayhem as they seek to slay the increasingly irate pterodactyl. Never a dull moment in Paris, that's for sure!

But to cut a lengthy and exceedingly involved story short (I've only touched upon a few of its multitudinous threads here!), Patmosis is finally revived, only for him to inform a horrified Adèle that he is not a medical doctor, but rather a doctor of nuclear physics – a physicist as opposed to a physician! (Seemingly, Ancient Egypt was indeed a lot more advanced in scientific matters than we'd expected!) However, he does possess the skills to revive the mummy of Rameses's real doctor, not to mention those of Rameses himself and his entire court, all of whom just so happen to be currently on display at the Louvre.

Patmosis duly achieves this, which leads to my favourite non-pterodactylian scene of the entire movie, in which the revived (CGI-animated) mummies decide to step outside of the Louvre and discover for themselves what a Paris evening in the 20^th Century AD is like. Their stately, elegantly-mannered demeanour, behaving with immense courtesy and charm like a parody of some genteel English tea party, is quite delightful and hilarious to behold, especially when various unsuspecting Parisians going about their innocent way encounter this resurrected retinue and flee in hysterical terror.

But you'll never guess what happens to the pterodactyl, whether Adèle's sister is indeed healed, and how the doomed RMS Titanic enters this tortuous tale! Which means that you'll have to watch The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec yourself to find out!

For a tantalizing trailer (with English subtitles) to give you a glimpse of the spectacle to expect from this ever-so-slightly manic but marvelous movie, however, be sure to click here and watch one on YouTube!

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.