Linda wants chicken, that’s the plot and the literal translation of the original French title of Chicken for Linda! (Linda veut du poulet!), a farce of sorts about a young girl and her hassled mum, a dead dad and a search to get together the ingredients to make the dish that reminds Linda of her missing papa.
Except. Maman does not cook. She’s a microwave queen whose cooking know-how extends about as far as the difference between shepherd’s pie and lasagne. But cook she must, because having accused Linda of stealing her ring she discovered that the cat had in fact swallowed it. And now that mum Paulette has found it again in a pile of the cat’s vomit, she must atone, by giving Linda whatever she wants. And Linda wants chicken cooked with peppers, just like her father used to make.
This being France – ho ho – there is a massive strike underway and all the shops are closed. And so Paulette steals a live chicken from a small farm, setting in train an extended chase sequence that involves Paulette and the chicken, Paulette’s sister Astrid, who can cook, a bumbling cop, a truck driver and a chain of escalating events, with chance stepping in regularly to turn the screw just a bit more and make things even more chaotic.
What sets Chicken for Linda! apart isn’t so much the story as the way its told. For starters it’s animated in a particularly blocky style, each person in the story having their own colour. Linda, for example, is yellow, from the top of her head to the sole of her shoes, her clothes and facial details picked out in chunky black lines. It’s a bit like the Modern Toss cartoons, if you know them, but more colourful.
There are musical interludes, too, during which characters express their hopes and fears in songs composed by Clément Ducol. Paulette is worried about rearing her child. Sister Astrid, a yoga teacher, pigs out on all the wrong food when stressed and worries about that. Dad has a song from beyond the grave about how to live the good life.
It is all tremendously charming, well paced and energetic, and though the animation is superficially quite simple, directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach achieve some startling effects – the way people look in the dark, the motion of a car speeding along, the slinky feline sway of Linda’s purple cat – with effects achieved through artistry rather than technology. There is a probably a lot of computer rendering going on here, and at times I wondered if rotoscoping had been used for some scenes, but it all comes second to the hand-drawn ambience.
Laudenbach’s work you might know if you’ve seen his animated adaptation of the little-known Grimm fairy tale The Girl Without Hands. Malta is more a live-action director. There seems to be a genuine synthesis going on between the pair of them.
Hovering away behind all the farce and the interesting visuals, a warm-hearted depiction of life in a high-rise, where kids play on the stairs and everyone knows everyone’s business, but in a good way. It’s slightly rose-tinted, for sure, but a corrective if you’ve had plenty from the other end of the spectrum.
The best film at Cannes in 2023, said Variety, possibly overdoing it a touch, when The Zone of Interest, Perfect Days, The Taste of Things and About Dry Grasses were all up for the Palme d’Or eventually won by Anatomy of a Fall. But it’s undeniably a fascinating, ingenious and inventive film that manages to be cute without being cutesy, no mean feat.
Chicken for Linda! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
