Hugo

Hugo

Dir: Martin Scorsese 2011

Hugo was my favorite film of 2011. I think I saw it three times in theatres because I kept thinking of more people I knew would appreciate it. I have a distinct memory of seeing this film on opening night in a completely empty theatre (it opened the same night as the new Muppet movie and had incredibly poor advertising) but that opening night experience was nothing short of magical. As soon as the credits started to roll I realized that Hugo had reminded me about everything that I loved about movies in the first place, as a young child.

Hugo is a little French boy who lives by himself above a Paris train station in 1931. Hugo’s only company high above the train station is a broken, mechanical, man. The boy very good with machines, a skill he learned from his father, (Jude Law) who was an inventor and watch repairman before his death. The film chronicles Hugo’s adventures around the city as well as his interactions with the regular patrons of the train station.

One day Hugo meets a young French girl in the train station. Her passion is reading and she shares these text based adventures with Hugo, who in turn introduces her to the magical world of motion pictures. This is where the film really picks up for me as a film geek. The audience is treated to a beautiful and interesting history lesson about the early days of film making. It’s more of a love letter to cinema than anything else by this point, the narrative is definitely still solid but I found myself being swept away by all of the scenes involving making films in the past.

This film really had me believing that films are where imagination really lives.