Refuge of Dragonflies

With one hand, there is the purely adaptation-side, if I may say it. I saw a lot of adaptations of the book "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" and "A Refuge of Dragonflies" is one of the three to be nowadays. And among all the others I know, yours is far to be the less faithful. Characters keep their essence, with a development for Esmeralda, with a "mother-side" ; Chancez is definitively the same except he has a redemption ; Moon Dog takes a great evolution, not only as a blind and insensible master of the Court of Miracles but also as Prophet ; Quasimodo and Frollo are just in the beginning but are fine too, even if Frollo loses in subtlety – I admit he's my favorite character in the book. The Dragonflies, the other people of the Court of Miracles, join to this living painting of his adaptation.

But with the other hand, and that's really this side who counts, it's everything you tried to make understand, above these classic characters and the chapter of Hugo. There is something in the atmosphere, in the haunting music, which leads us to wonder what's happening…beyond the basest facts that appear, to wonder what's the meaning behind. It's impossible to have a so haunting music if it doesn't mean something, like it's impossible too to have these plans that looks like poetry or a dream, these plans that sometimes go like a dream when there is a changing of place or time, it there was nothing behind. So that's what I tried to understand, watching the movie four times since yesterday. Because if it looks like a dream, so things are symbolic and the understanding is better and other, of course. And the dialogues are to be taken in another sense, also.

With this point of view, Frollo and Quasimodo are the nightmare, the evil that tries to absorb the light, the kindness, embodied in Esmeralda, the "celestial street dancer". (When I saw her dancing in front of Chancez ready to be hanged, I thought "This nickname couldn't have been another one !") Chancez appears like a human taken in these two immortal adversaries by chance, or maybe because he's in the middle of these extremes : writing unsuccessfully to try to change the world, but doomed to live in poverty and ignorance of the others. And maybe it's because he has to go beyond this humanity and all the ego things related too, he's put on the trial, maybe to show he can live in another way, without egotism at least. Moon Dog, in this scene, appeared me like a reflection of Chancez's future if he was going in the right way. And Esmeralda, who appears as well as a figure temptation in front of Frollo, as the celestial street dancer above of Chancez and also like a innocent young girl and mother (I saw her like that with this plan where she stops to dance and puts over his head her scarf, her face is so different). And Chancez is like one of these orphans who hadn't the chance to know love or refuge before Esmeralda – a dragonfly too, someone of lost, even if he has an aim in his life, and who needed help. Like the other dragonflies around them, they're people who are lost, then who joined to survive, and who can live this way. It's like, for Chancez, a quest to find himself or a redemption. And it's not so far from what we can interpret with the original characters. In this movie, they're drawn like absolutes, and why these absolutes, instead of the habitual figures of innocence (Esmeralda), poetic wandering (Gringoire), monster with a heart (Quasimodo), humanity's conflict with religion (Frollo) or blind justice (Clopin), wouldn't be the ones you made ? These absolutes fit, even embodied in corporal bodies, and the dream atmosphere works to it, with this haunting music, and the passenger Dragonflies around them, who strengthen this "dream". A dream that can save them.

The last thing I can add, it's this. I think also that the Art – not matters its form, book, movie, or music – is a way to transform what you lived, what you felt, in something of beautiful to offer to you and to the others, to move them, and that's what you did with this movie - that's why also art is painful - with the great team you had, with the great work you did and that we can see there, "A refuge of dragonflies." And if I understood well, this interpretation of the psyche's faces, you will keep to do it, to make it better understandable, with the others chapters you will do later. Like a work with understandable, separate chapters, that together, brings the whole dimension of what you want to draw.