Cogwheels and pinions may also be beautiful

Rating: 8/10 (1 March 2012)

And clock machines too. This beautiful movie develops itself in and around a Parisian railway station in the twenties of last century where a small boy named Hugo is in charge of all the station complicated clocks since when his father died. His drunken uncle was the one in charge of that job and when he assumed the boy's guardianship put him to take care of the clocks huge mechanisms while he estranged himself for good to devote himself to drink and laziness. Nobody seemed to take notice of this and the boy could survive alone on petty thefts and some vagrancy. The boy however had an innate talent for mechanics and was trying to repair a strange automaton his father had left and was abandoned in the museum where the latter worked before dying. The boy's petty thefts lead himself to enter in contact with an old man who owned a toy shop (first in bad terms because the old man was also object of the boy's thefts) and his pupil girl approximately the boy's age. Between the two children a friendly relationship takes place and they began an adventurous life together in default of the girl's guardian who later was known to be the famous silent movies maker Georges Méliès who by that time had fallen into oblivion. All this is told in gorgeous images and sceneries reproducing faithfully the epoch in question and many moving scenes till the final climax which is also very moving in sentimental terms. A masterpiece indeed.