CHICKEN FOR LINDA! - Mark Reviews Movies

Chicken for Linda!, GKIDS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2024

On the surface, Chicken for Linda! (The punctuation is warranted) is about a girl who really wants to eat chicken with peppers. Beneath that, though, is the story of a girl who's desperate for some connection to her father, who died when she was just a toddler and whose only vague or perhaps subconscious memory of him is that he made that meal moments before his death. We have to laugh at the adventures the girl and her mother get into in order to prepare the dish, or else, we might start crying for how tragic this story actually is.

Laugh we do, though, because co-writers/directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach bring a real sense of wackiness to the escapades of Linda (voice of Mélinée Leclerc), her mother Paulette (voice of Clotilde Hesme), and a fairly sizeable cast of relatives, friends, and strangers. People don't typically associate logic with comedy, especially a comedic tale as silly and chaotic as this animated one can become, but it has to be there in some form. Here, it's all about how and why the daughter and mother go from one place, one encounter, and one scheme to the next, and yes, it all makes sense from the perspective of a farce about things going as wrong as they possibly could.

More importantly, though, is the emotional logic behind these misadventures. The daughter and the mother are lonely, grieving, and certain they're doing something wrong in their respective familial roles, even if they can't quite be sure what that is. The mischievous Linda can't figure out why her mother is so untrusting of her, because she's just a kid. Meanwhile, Paulette has no idea why her daughter gets into so much trouble and disobeys her, even though she was the same way as a child and, according to her own sister, has never really matured beyond those characteristics.

All of this is only made worse when Paulette punishes Linda for something the girl didn't even do. Once the shenanigans involving the preparation for a meal start, the two of them are equally desperate: Linda for that hazy need for connection and Paulette for making up for a doubly painful mistake. They'll pretty much do anything to accomplish this seemingly simple but practically challenging—in ways that keep getting worse and more complicated with each step—goal.

After a pair of rather haunting prologues (One imagines an unthinkable darkness, which it later turns out is referencing death, and the other shows the family at their happiest, as bright bubbles at the dinner table, until the father's bubble suddenly pops without warning), we get a sense of what life is for Linda and Paulette. The mother has stuck to microwave meals since her husband, the chef in the family, died, and she's thrilled at the prospect of going out on the town again for no special occasion. Those plans are foiled, though, when Linda tries to borrow her mother's wedding ring against Paulette's denial.

Upon the daughter's return home from school with a beret a friend lent to her, Paulette is certain Linda took the ring and exchanged it for the hat. The two argue. A fed-up Paulette decides to bring the girl to her sister, Linda's aunt, Astrid (Laetitia Dosch) as punishment, and when Linda calls her mother a word Paulette had called herself only minutes ago, the mother slaps her daughter out of frustration.

As it turns out, Linda didn't take the ring. The family cat swallowed it and vomits it up for an already-guilty-feeling Paulette to discover. To apologize, Paulette picks up Linda from Astrid's and tells the girl she'll do anything Linda asks. The daughter wants chicken with peppers.

It's a simple request, except that Paulette isn't comfortable with cooking, and a simple errand, except that every store is closed due to a workers' strike. The plot, technically, is simple, too, because all Paulette and Linda need to do is find two ingredients, but under the circumstances, it means Paulette ends up stealing a chicken from a local farm. Oh, the chicken is alive, by the way.

What is genuinely simple, though, is the film's art style, which uses hard, definitive lines for the characters and fills each one in with a solid, bright color (The backgrounds are softer and even less precise, which makes the characters pop against them). Beyond that, there are entire scenes in which the figures and animation become almost abstract, such as a how the gossip of kids in the apartment complex are portrayed by speech bubbles with large mouths inside them or, for most its screen time, the chicken is just a ball of fluffy feathers, bouncing around here and there to escape its fate.

With the basic plot and character elements established, the filmmakers focus on movement and action, in other words, even if that means sacrificing detail in favor of momentum. It's a novel choice and one that pays off, because there's plenty of movement and action in the everyday but goofy quest that follows. The specifics are best to be discovered, especially since the screenplay finds clever ways to make one event follow into the next or to introduce a complication that becomes a bigger problem later. In general terms, there are chases, standoffs, interruptions for songs, and a convoluted process by which a rookie cop ends up stuck in a tree in his underwear.

It's simple, yes, but delightful in its comedic logic and invention. That Chicken for Linda! also possesses a poignant story about grief, memory, and the difficult bonds of familial connection makes the film mean a bit more than the gags, too.

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