Attila Marcel

Cast

Production

The film was produced through Eurowide Film Production. The budget was 6,7 million euro. Filming took place in the Paris area from mid-July 2012 and lasted 46 days.

Release

The film premiered in the Special Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. It was released in France by Pathé Distribution on 30 October 2013. It had 43,645 admissions in France.

Reception

Attila Marcel has been met with mixed critical response from the French press with Le Parisien scoring it 5/5 whilst the influential Cahiers du cinéma scored it 1/5. Collating press reviews French online film site Allocine reports an average press critic score of 3.2/5 within France.

Boyd van Hoeij of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "Both tonally and esthetically, the film's clearly a new twig on the family tree that started somewhere before Jacques Tati and branched out to include works from such noted French-language filmmakers as Jacques Demy, Jaco Van Dormael, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Michel Gondry. With its eye-popping production and costume design; its heavily vintage-leaning musical arrangements (co-composed by Chomet); characters breaking out into song and its constant oscillation between wondrous joy and heartfelt melancholy, Marcel fits right in and should be able to drum up significant interest on home turf." Hoeij continued: "Carlos Conti’s production design feels whimsical but organic and is completely in synch with Olivier Beriot’s costume design. ... The score and songs (most of them explicitly composed for the film) also evoke times past."