The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)

The film opens in 1912 Paris, where a pterosaur hatched from a 135-million-year-old egg terrorizes the city, a mummified Egyptian court waits in the Louvre, and a comatose twin sister lies felled by a hatpin. Luc Besson, adapting Jacques Tardi's comic, has built a machine for incident and little else. It is a romp in the old sense: consequence-free, and content to be so. No sermon waits at the end.

Louise Bourgoin's Adèle drives the plot with brash self-direction. She rescues a condemned scientist, rides the pterosaur through the sky, and negotiates with a pharaoh. This gives the yarn a distaff spin, and the picture is better for it. It reads as genre inheritance, not a program. The ensemble is a white French company, with Youssef Hajdi's Aziz as the Egyptian guide, and the Cairo sequence treats its mummies as pulp furniture. Nobody in the film has anything to say about empire. The film does not either.

The villains are a deranged scientist and a pompous big game hunter. Money is never the subject. Eccentricity is played for whimsy, and the padded costume on the bumbling inspector exists to land a gag. Nothing here lectures, nothing asks us to examine our assumptions, nothing arranges its characters into an argument about how we ought to live. The César for production design is the award this film earned. It closes with Adèle boarding a ship named Titanic, which is the sort of joke a picture makes when it has no thesis at all. Refreshing, in its way. Nearly extinct, too.