CHICKEN FOR LINDA!: Empty Stomachs, Empty Minds

Leave it to the French to make an animated film combining workers’ strikes, civil unrest, and a Roman chicken recipe. In the colorful Chicken for Linda!, a girl (voiced by Mélinée Leclerc) insists that her mother, Paulette (Clotilde Hesme), make her chicken, sparking a silly adventure through urban France. The police get involved after Paulette steals a live chicken, Linda rallies her friends to help prepare it, troops armed in riot gear descend on a housing block, and the whole thing feels like a footnote in a Victor Hugo story. Stealing a chicken to feed one’s daughter, after all, isn’t a million miles away from Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread.

Our obsessive Inspector Javert giving chase here is a moronic policeman named Serge (Estéban), and in their escape, Paulette and Linda stow away in a lorry, driven by Jean-Michel (Patrick Pineau). The plot also ropes in Paulette’s sister, a yoga instructor named Astrid (Laetitia Dosch), who feels like she has to perpetually clean up Paulette’s messes.

Critics have adored Chicken for Linda! since its 2023 Cannes premiere. In an era where animation has evolved to computer-generated homogeneity, many see the unique art style and low-stakes story of Chicken for Linda! as a breath of French air. But “low-stakes” and “slight” are separated by the thinnest of walls, and Chicken for Linda! often feels like an empty, soulless artistic experiment, an idea plucked of its feathers that lacks both charm and nuance.

A Dead Dad And A Stolen Chicken

At its heart, Chicken for Linda! is a mundane French kitchen sink drama with a precocious-child poultry plot basted over top. The film tries to appeal to both adults and children, but while many film critics like the movie, I have a hard time imagining a 6-year-old being entertained by depictions of child abuse and police brutality. The lighthearted antics of Linda and her pals only extend so far, and the slapstick grates against the more serious elements of the story.

The film’s principal problems are its characters. Linda is an annoying, cloying, lying brat, and she sucks. Her mother is irresponsible and entitled. All the problems in the film are of her making — after accusing Linda of stealing and trading away a priceless ring, she slaps her, then carts her off to her sister’s for the night as punishment. Later, motivated by that guilt, she steals a chicken purely because she believes she has the right to do it and the ability to get away with it. You would be forgiven for erroneously thinking that these characters will grow or change throughout the story — Chicken for Linda! never challenges them, only vindicates and enables them. They’re the exact same at the end of the film as at the start, learning nothing but how incompetent the French police are and how easy it is to get away with chicken theft.

There’s a chicken nugget of benevolence buried deep within the film. For much of the runtime, Linda insists on a roast chicken dinner, and the film tries to play coy with her motivation, despite it being pretty obvious to anybody who remembers the first five minutes. This particular Roman chicken recipe was a favorite of Linda’s dead dad, and eating it makes her feel close to him. It’s the dish he’s making at the start of the film for baby Linda when he suddenly drops dead in the kitchen. That happens in the first scene. Then, in the finale, Linda has a grand revelation… that she saw her dad die. Linda, we KNOW. We saw the first scene of the movie. We’re not idiots.

The chicken incentive is little more than a fanciful pretence for a film that couldn’t care less about Linda’s motive or her dead father — ultimately, it doesn’t matter what her Dad loved or that Linda wanted to connect with him. The chicken was a red herring the whole time, an easy excuse for drama so that Linda and her mom could grow closer together.

Ignoring Reality

In Chicken for Linda!, the mundane and the fantastical butt heads in every instance. Props to screenwriters Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, who also direct the film, for ending the drama with riot police facing off against a crowd of candy-mad children, because that’s exactly the sort of insane story decision that I want to see in an independent animated film. But either the film commits to depicting the problems facing modern France or it doesn’t, and Chicken for Linda! wants to have it both ways. It’s confrontational but, since it insists on being a feel-good kids’ movie about a brat who wants chicken, cannot reconcile that confrontation with its story. The tug-of-war between realism and fantasy never settles, only becoming more and more aggressive in its swings between children fighting over sweets and workers’ rights, a police officer sitting naked in a tree and harsh totalitarian state violence.

I have no patience for a film that ignores reality. France has a police problem, almost as much as the U.K. or the U.S. But you don’t need a review of an animated kids film to tell you that — in a time where French films like After the Fire and Athena condemn the French police state and depict the urgent need for change, Chicken for Linda! feels more than a bit insulting. The police are not treated as a threat, and our sole policeman character is shown to be a bumbling, incompetent inspector. (I also have my doubts about the film’s attitude toward the children in this social housing complex — they’re shown to be impulsive troublemakers prone to violence, which I’m sure some French poverty advocacy groups cannot be happy about.)

Notes On The Animation

Fresh new animation styles tend to get lauded by critics, and Chicken for Linda! is no exception. The film’s characters are drawn with thick black lines and filled in with single swathes of color. From shot to shot, it makes the film look like a storybook, but there’s no consistency to how the characters are drawn. In one frame, Paulette’s entire body can disappear, and in the next, we see just the outline of her coat and her cleavage. The lines that make up characters drop and reform from one frame to the next, and the effect is one of laziness rather than spirited difference. I know it was made with a small team, but the animation looks bad — it would definitely have benefitted from a few more months of labor. As it stands, the characters appear as the story itself does: lazily, quickly, and dirtily drawn.

I do mean “dirtily” by the way — in a Ralph Bakshi sort of touch, the cat’s butthole is always drawn, even when the outline of the animal isn’t. And kids’ movie or not, the mature female characters are drawn in a suggestive, sensual manner that made me uncomfortable. The directors said in an interview with Animation World that “Paulette is even sexy” and that “The animators took great pleasure in drawing [Paulette and Linda],” which is the sort of comment that makes me think these two should be barred from making any more films for children.

Conclusion

Chicken for Linda! is a movie of thin characters and thin themes. I referenced Victor Hugo at the beginning of the review — many critics have called Chicken for Linda! a “very French” film without highlighting specific artistic themes or cultural attitudes that shape that identity. Hugo is as French as escargot — he’s a cultural institution. But he also championed for social reform for the penal system and slavery and produced work that actually means something, as opposed to Chicken for Linda!, which only trivializes the problems facing modern France. Being Hugo-esque is one way someone can mean a work is “very French,” and though the premise recalls some beats in Les Misérables, Chicken for Linda! isn’t Hugo-esque at all — it appears to have some life of its own and a unique outlook for an animated film, but really it’s all style and no substance. Either the critics who call it “very French” don’t know what national French culture or art look like, feel like, advocate for, or everything they know about France they learn from watching Ratatouille and Emily in Paris. The film pays lip service to workers’ rights, child poverty, and police brutality but never engages with these ideas in deeper ways, only resolving them tidily so it can get on with its own inane, annoying plot.

There are musical numbers, too, by the way — that I hadn’t thought to mention them until now gives you an idea of how crucial they are to the story (hint: they’re not important at all). Chicken for Linda! is the definition of a film that would’ve played better as a 30-minute short — at 76 minutes, it feels undercooked.

Chicken for Linda! is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.