In Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach’s Chicken for Linda!, Paulette (Clotilde Hesme) feels guilty about punishing her eight-year-old daughter, Linda (Mélinée Leclerc), for something she didn’t do. To make things up to Linda, Paulette agrees to prepare the dish that was her late husband’s specialty: chicken with peppers. The day of the dinner, though, coincides with a widespread strike, closing all the grocery stores across town and forcing Paulette, with Linda in tow, to improvise. What follows is a charming, madcap race to the dinner table that manages to rope in bumbling cops, a determined older sister, and live poultry.
Chicken for Linda! is beautifully animated in a style that has its roots in the hand-painted aesthetic of Laudenbach’s 2016 film The Girl Without Hands, though it feels completely distinctive. The characters are given cartoonish features through prominent black lines and single colors to distinguish them; Linda herself is totally yellow while Paulette is orange and her husband was red. The film is an original work, though it ably captures the energy of a quirky children’s book—albeit one with a rather cavalier attitude toward killing animals.
The setup bears a curious resemblance to Eric Gravel’s recent Full Time, another French film about a single mother racing against the clock through the obstacles created by a strike. And though Chicken for Linda! is clearly less interested in drama by comparison, it nevertheless works to create sympathy for Paulette, whose initial punishment of Linda arises from stress and the hope of going out for a change. Linda’s desire for a home-cooked meal, too, can be traced to an earlier scene where Paulette tears the plastic off of two microwaved dinners. Even if she had the time to cook when her husband was alive, she clearly wasn’t the chef of the family.
With how such simple, striking colors sit on top of more detailed, naturalistic movements, the film’s very animation seems to express an intended contrast between the sober grounding in a recognizable reality and zany escalation of the narrative. But the result feels pulled in opposing directions, complete with a few musical sequences dropped awkwardly into the mix.
Malta and Laudenbach use grief and guilt only insofar as they need to create the central conflict, which would otherwise strain credulity that Linda and Paulette simply can’t wait for a few days to make and eat their chicken dish. And by the time the film circles back to that emotional core, it’s been tipped over and emptied out in pursuit of the wackier sequences that encompass so much of the running time that the catharsis feels like an afterthought. However pleasurable and pretty Chicken for Linda! may be in its individual scenes, it doesn’t so much achieve harmony through its balancing of contrasting elements as it fully surrenders to childlike whimsy.
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