Chicken For Linda!

Directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach

Running time: 1hr16 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Chicken For Linda by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach

In an animation landscape dominated by America in the West and Japan in the East, animation hailing from Europe (with some exceptions, such as Aardman in the UK) feels like a more modest industry. But that’s not to say it doesn’t produce plenty of gems. French family drama Chicken For Linda!, written and directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, is a fine example.

The plot has a melancholy undertow to it. When young widow Paulette unfairly blames her small daughter Linda for having a lost a ring given to her by her late husband (only to later find it in a fresh pile of vomited chucked up by Gazza, a fat mauve cat with yellow eyes and a rosy pink bumhole), she naturally feels guilty. She asks what she can do to make it up to Linda, and it turns out Linda wants only one thing: Roman-style chicken with peppers. Linda can’t really remember her father because she was so small when he passed away, but she remembers the flavour of his signature dish and wants to experience it again. 

Linda is a neatly-realised character – she has a plausibly mischievous spark which sees her do things like push peas up her nose and snort them out again, but she’s also clearly been impacted by the loss of her dad, asking questions like, “When we’re dead, are we in the dark?” which Paulette answers to the best of her ability.

Visually, Chicken For Linda! is a vivid Fauvist dreamscape, but with down-to-earth verité sound design making the most of naturalistic performances by the voice-cast, two contrasting approaches which brush up against each other nicely, and complement the occasional musical interlude, with recurring use made of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. That’s not the only quotation from a much older piece of art: at one point a potential love interest for Paulette quotes from Les Amours, a 16th century collection of verse about an unattainable love, Cassandre, by the poet Ronsard:

I wish I could die for this blonde hair, 

For the swell of your most chaste breast, 

For the strictness of this sweet hand, 

Which in one stroke cures me and harms me.

So, y’know, if you’re ever left hungering for something slightly more ambitious than the latest IP value extraction exercise from Disney, but which you can still watch with a younger audience, France has your back.

CHICKEN FOR LINDA (2023) Written by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach | Edited by Catherine Aladenise

Playing at the 76th Cannes Film festival as part of the ACID strand