Midweek Mention... Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

Reegs: We rarely sit down to watch a film and then review it straight afterwards Dan But that is exactly what we've just done

Dan: Yeah, well this is a bonus treat for everyone involved. Yeah

Reegs: we were so compelled by what we just watched slash had a spare half an hour to record our thoughts

So here they are.

Dan: are.

Marcel the Shell with shoes on.

Reegs: Yes.

Dan: I'd heard of this actually a long time ago and then it had been completely out my mind until you mentioned it and put it on. It was one of those, we were looking for a 90 minute film,

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: And we didn't spend too long faffing around before we plumbed for this one.

Reegs: We settled on this one, and the setup is, it's kind of.

Creature Comforts, if you remember the series of British Gas, I think they were adverts for Aardman Animation, where it had regular people dubbed over with like comedy tortoises, very turn off and honourable, I think

Dan: Yeah, that's right.

Reegs: It's kind of that central conceit. It's it's Marcel, who happens to be a shell who has shoes.

Dan: Yeah. He is a one inch like Winkle shell,

Reegs: Yeah, we decided a Winkle. Yeah.

Dan: kind of looks like that.

Reegs: and you know, the story opens with documentary filmmaker Dean the self titled Dean played by Dean Fleischer camp the director and writer of the movie, he has moved into an Airbnb and has after breaking up with his wife and has discovered.

At this Airbnb is Marcel and his grandma. And the first sort of five or 10 minutes of the movie is documented to, I mean, it's presented matter of factly. He doesn't seem as astonished as I would be

Dan: no, that's right

Reegs: talking shell. But he is fascinated by Marcel's life and resourcefulness and cheerful attitude.

And you know, the way he goes about his day,

Dan: it's a wonderful little world that he's got.

Reegs: it's a strange one at first, but,

Dan: Yeah, we see a tennis ball Kind of just moving around the floor and he calls that the rover And in there he feels pretty safe and it allows him to to navigate the the floor particularly when there's cats or wild

Reegs: Well Dean has a dog that is a constant sort of terrifying threat really to to Marcel.

Dan: He's quite worried about it. But as a dean is documenting Documenting marcel and He ends up putting them on youtube.

Reegs: So really, I mean, what we, you know, you said to me early on, Oh, he's got this character, let's see what he can do with it.

And that's really what it is, is, you know, Marcel is a lens to experience lots and lots of sort of facets of the human experience. So really early on, you're treated to like his relationship with his grandma who has dementia. And you know, that, you know, Touches on that. And also you learn of how he was separated from the rest of his family, draws a family trees, mother, was it Carla and Mario?

Whereas father and mother, he was separated from them when the previous residents of the Airbnb had had an argument they were known for arguing this couple. And if you've ever argued with your spouse in front of the kids, this scene will just like, hammer you in the heart as they eventually, you know, sort of split up one day and the guy moves out and they go their separate ways.

And he's, and one of them has taken the family,

Dan: In a sock

Reegs: in a sock drawer or something. So yeah, that's how Marcel and his grandma have come to be Airbnb. So yeah, that I found that, you know, That part where he's talking about how their anger affected them effectively. It's quite

Dan: Yeah, there's lots of deep themes in this actually isn't there? And

Reegs: but you're right it does he he posts this stuff on the internet and he becomes a celebrity and we actually get to deal with the vacuousness of celebrity culture as well because people it's ostensibly under the idea of finding his family.

Dan: But everybody is just saying, oh, you are cool. You are great. Oh, this is

You know wonderful and eventually

Reegs: they just want to have their photo taken outside their

Dan: Find his house. And yeah, that's it. No one's really trying to help him find his family

Reegs: No.

Dan: And he has all these kind of little routines set up doesn't he through the day grandma does the gardening?

And there's these other little characters that that pop up spiders a little family of three little kids Kind of those little hopper spiders, you know, Yeah It's really clever though. It's really well done. And the ideas of bottle tops carrying water and

Reegs: his mother, his, his grandmother becomes unwell and she has to use a bottled cap. What is it like the metal part of.

A

Dan: a wine cork.

Yeah. Yeah.

Reegs: that probably has a word, but I don't

Dan: We don't know it, somebody

Reegs: Yeah, so the foil part she uses that as a sort of zoomer frame. Yeah.

Dan: clever, the little world that they've created around Marcel, but it's

Reegs: And very charming.

Dan: It is really charming. Charming and it's also quite sad as as you say you go through this, This emptiness of celebrity that he finds and he's never really into it to be fair But one day they wake up to like 20 million views and he's he's everywhere and 60 minutes Want to do a show on him?

But in

Reegs: where he's

Dan: grandma's had an accident.

Reegs: exactly. Yeah, they've I mean they they're never at pains. They're always at pain Sorry to point out that you know, like it's The, the shells are quite vulnerable. I mean, you see a squirrel come in and it causes absolute mayhem. And then later, I think she falls off the washing

Dan: the yeah off the laundry basket or or the washing machine

Reegs: And she's cracked her shell, Dan.

Dan: Yeah, and, and again, it's, it's all, you know, themes of looking after somebody who's,

Reegs: Yeah. Being a

Dan: old and frail, frail and being a carer.

Reegs: The toll it takes on you and yeah, being there for someone and the lack of dignity as well. In the person who's being cared

for

Dan: then this opportunity comes up and grandma really wants him to take it. And also the sacrifice she makes within herself by putting forcing on her, her health and and putting up a facade of being better than she, she is.

So he can take this opportunity because he won't do it for her health. He doesn't want all the people around and he thinks that will upset her recovery getting better. But he does take this chance anyway, and 60 minutes come to the house and, and during this point, Grandma meets a ladybug, doesn't she on the window and they kind of just wander into the light together and and she disappears and that's

Reegs: And then he's kind of all on

Dan: Yeah,

Reegs: his,

Dan: then, and then he's kind of all on his, his own, but

Reegs: And then we get to watch the documentary, which freak, because they get in contact with him to say, look, I mean, you know exactly what's

Dan: so it's weird. So you've, you've watched this this documentary kind of shaky film begin.

You've got this shell

Reegs: Were we clear about that, that it's like that mockumentary style? Yeah, hopefully we were.

Dan: Yeah, it is. And and you sometimes see the camera turned by Marcel back on the filmmaker himself. And he quickly closes down because he's, he's very sure that this film is about Marcel, not about him, that he doesn't want anyone to know. His story to be told, and Marcel sometimes pulls out him up about that, doesn't he?

Reegs: Yeah, he says, you're here, you're participating in my life.

Dan: I'm what I'm sharing. Why are you not sharing? And so he's turning the camera back on himself in many ways as well, which was interesting. Because this does ask lots of kind of questions still. And it's as he goes on. He has the chance to find his family, doesn't he?

He does,

Reegs: yeah. Through 60 Minutes, they're able to reunite the couple that fought, and

Dan: and they fight again.

Reegs: again! Yeah, exactly. They go back to find the guy, and they can't find Marcel's family. It's a big source of tension. It causes the couple to fight again. And at that point, he knows that where they'll be

Dan: they'll huddle away in a,

Reegs: a particular place that all the shell people are drawn there and it's a kind of Magical moment in the context of the film where he finds his family There's about 30

Dan: 30 of them.

Reegs: and then when it when it expands even more there's all sorts of weird shit There's like a fucking tampon with eyes on it

Dan: There's a cheeto, there's peanuts there's Pretzels. Yeah,

Reegs: they're all singing and dancing and all that stuff.

It's a big happy reunion of the family.

Dan: There's loads of cute little bits in this little details within the animation and small little laughs.

He's a really charming and cute character, Marcel, isn't

Reegs: Yeah. Are you going straight into it? Yeah. I mean, in terms of the end of the movie, we're right there, aren't we?

Because you know, everybody moves on, really. I think the main thing is that Dean moves on. He finds a new apartment to live in. He starts a new relationship.

Dan: Because, yeah, it's also the reason he is there is because the end of his own

Reegs: Yeah so I think that's quite nice. And I wonder, we haven't had the time to do any of the normal kinds of research, but it would be very surprising to me if there wasn't quite an element of autobiography in Dean Fleischerkamp's writing and

Dan: Oh yeah, it felt that way. It felt quite a, a personal story, which is why it was interesting to see what he was going to throw up because you could do anything with this character. You could tell any story, but he's told a story really about, you know, life and loss about, you know, Getting over that and and looking towards the future because he's quite an optimistic character, Marcel overall.

He does have a couple of dips obviously when but he, he handles it all well and with solid emotion and he wears his heart on his sleeve. He likes to be entertaining. He sings, doesn't he? But

Reegs: it's so much sucked

Dan: out of him while he was going through this these tougher days.

Reegs: Because you do see him go through a spectra of spectrum of things that he has to deal with.

And it's like you say the big things in life. I've wondered at times when I was watching it if it wasn't insufferably pretentious as well as at the same time. I mean, I did enjoy the it always gets me because it does tackle like many of the very big themes of life, you know, grief and loss and change and.

And then other stuff, like you say, like we talked about the caring and all that stuff, like really big stuff. So, I couldn't hate anything that was talking about those things, but when it was reading a poem for about five minutes in the middle of it, my mind wandered for quite a

Dan: while I must say there was a few if even for an hour and a half It felt a little long at parts. I thought they They talked a lot to the camera.

It's a documentary film they were making. But as you say, even though he's a shell nobody seemed to, it was just a celebrity. It wasn't any more bizarre than that.

Reegs: But would you believe a shell with shoes on can show you what it's like to be very human? because that's what this film is like.

Dan: Yeah, I would go with that.

Reegs: It's not going to be for everyone though, is it? There's going to be some people who are out just on concept alone, I would think.

Dan: to be honest, the first Five or 10 minutes. I was unsure of myself and you had to stick with it and hope that it was going to go somewhere. And that's why about the time I turned to you and just said, well, let's, let's give this a chance to see where he takes it.

And he's taken on really big themes. He's done it with a light hearted touch in where he can, but it was, you know, You know, it didn't make me laugh or cry, but it certainly pulled on the heartstrings.

Reegs: Yeah, pulled on the heartstrings. I did laugh a couple of times actually, there were a couple of jokes that got me.

I can't even tell you one now, which is, that's how memorable they

Dan: were.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, like that.

Reegs: Yeah,

But strong

Dan: Strong recommend.