The elegant, eccentric inventions of the French director Michel Gondry have made him an acquired taste and a divisive figure, and this new surreal excursion will for many be like eating an anvil-sized block of Marmite, drinking liquid Marmite and breathing Marmite in gaseous form.
Gondry certainly has to be one of the most distinctive film-makers, best known for his hugely admired Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, all about the imaginary neuroscience of removing unpleasant memories, although I personally preferred his equally strange The Science of Sleep, with Gael García Bernal as the host of a homespun fantasy-TV show being recorded in his own bedroom. Whatever else he is, Gondry is an object lesson in the dangers of abandoning your vision and selling out: in 2011, he took the studio dollar and made a conventional superhero action-comedy The Green Hornet, with Seth Rogen. The result was a very conventional clunker. This is a return to type and a return to form: a sort of love story and a sort of Love Story.
It is an adaptation of the 1947 novel by Boris Vian, L’Ecume des Jours, or The Froth of Days: variously translated as The Froth of Daydreams or The Foam of Daze, the airy, iridescent fantasies and thoughts that float free of our workaday lives, forming, perhaps, an alternative narrative, a different life story running parallel to the duller one below. (The title of the UK release is Mood Indigo, after the composition by Duke Ellington, whose music is a persistent theme.) The setting is Paris, and Romain Duris plays Colin, a young man in love with Chloé, played by Audrey Tautou, who falls ill with a flower growing in her lung. Colin lives with his buddy Nicolas (Omar Sy), a chef, in a converted rail carriage suspended between two buildings, where he works on inventions such as his Pianocktail, a piano that creates cocktails.
The story unfolds in a crazy world of kaleidoscopic kidulthood which gets more sombre and monochrome as things proceed: not a single scene or frame goes past without the cymbal clash of wackiness or the splat of surreality. Sometimes these flourishes are funny, sometimes just weird, but their sheer inventive persistence prevents them being tiresome. The fantasy always stops a millimetre short of being annoying, or perhaps it is that it goes exactly a millimetre beyond being annoying. As in his previous films, there are hints of Richard Lester, Jan Švankmajer and Terry Gilliam. And when Nicolas sweeps the crockery and food off the table with a crash, there is a touch of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter. Colin’s friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh) is a great admirer of a philosopher called Jean-Sol Partre, and everyone is living in a spoonerised reality, a jumbled-up world. And that flower in Chloé’s lung, though apparently quirky and twee in the extreme, soon becomes sad and almost shocking, thanks to the consistency with which the story is worked though. The couple consult a doctor, played in cameo by Gondry himself, who proposes a drawn-out remedial treatment including surgery, whose costs Colin must meet by taking grim jobs, including one in a bizarre giant office in which secretarial types bash out words as best they can on a succession of old-fashioned typewriters that roll mystifyingly past on a Chaplinesque conveyor belt.
Is Chloé’s pulmonary-floral condition a fantasy-dream version of some far more brutally banal ailment from the real world? She is seen thoughtfully smoking a cigarette in one scene while actually lying on the operating table. Are we supposed to read between the lines of this movie? Perhaps it is something to be decoded, a feature-length dream sequence, or a delusion which is actually a grief-symptom? Wondering about this gives savour to the movie: not that this rich, dense stew needs savour, exactly. While the couple are brooding on what their future might be, they challenge each other to see who can be the most boringly normal. The game seems to fizzle out within seconds of being proposed.
Another kind of normality, or banality, is creeping up behind Colin and Chloé, whether they feel like playing the game or not. Gravity has been modified in this film, and so has emotional weight, although the effects of this are unexpected. All the loopiness and spaciness might lead you to think you are not making any emotional investment at all in this baffling and barmy romance. Yet its sadness and poignancy somehow appear, popping up like cartoon flowers.
