By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Michel Gondry
Starring: Aissa Maiga | Audrey Tautou | Charlotte Le Bon | Gad Elmaleh | Omar Sy | Romain Duris
Original language title: L'écume des jours
Country: belgium, france
Year: 2014
Running time: 94
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2027140/combined
Chris says: “Michel Gondry’s most ambitious film to date, MOOD INDIGO alternately plays like one of the director’s early, playfully innovative music videos stretched to feature-length, or ETERNAL SUNSHINE without brakes, or AMELIE on crack. An adaptation of a beloved 1947 French novel by Boris Vian, it’s set in a alternate-universe Paris full of retro accents (mid-century jazz fills the soundtrack and informs the characters’ aesthetic) and futuristic embellishments, like a ‘pianocktail’, an upright that concocts potent potables whose ingredients are determined by the keys played and pedals pushed.
“The lead, independently wealthy Colin (Romain Duris) leisurely spends his days in the company of his pianocktail, his man-servant Nicolas (Omar Sy), best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh), who is obsessed with the writer Jean-Sol Partre (think about it for a second), and a little mouse who lives in his intricately-designed home, teeming with habitrails and a menagerie of fanciful gewgaws like an animated doorbell that disintegrates and reassembles whenever rung. As Nicolas and Chick settle down with romantic partners, Colin begins to feel left out. At a party, he meets his true love Chloe (played by Amelie herself, Audrey Tautou) and their whirlwind romance climaxes in a grand wedding ceremony, perhaps cinema’s first to include an impromptu, inexplicable but highly entertaining go-kart drag race throughout the cathedral.
“While Duris and Tautou are fine, this is emphatically a director’s showcase. Gondry continually ramps up the film’s pace to the point where it nearly overwhelms; viewers who do not possess a stomach for such whimsy will probably take offense. However, after peaking with a delirious honeymoon sequence (scored to Boz Scaggs’ ‘Lowdown’, of all things), the tone shifts gradually at first, and then dramatically. Without giving too much away, MOOD INDIGO reveals itself as a much darker, weightier tale than it initially appears. The second half’s production design—an increasingly washed out color palette and a muted, introspective calm best personified by the repeated use of Mia Doi Todd’s spare, melancholy song ‘Spring’—is as affecting as the first half’s zippy, sensory overload.
“I wasn’t familiar with Vian’s novel, which doesn’t have the cultural currency here it obviously has in France, but various comments online suggest this is a faithful adaptation, particularly in, well, its mood and how it evolves from beginning to end. In that case, it’s an ideal text for Gondry, for it matches up with what ETERNAL SUNSHINE had to say about how love inevitably fades—only here, anything that fills a life with happiness and contentment is subject to change. In other words, Nothing Lasts Forever. As with ETERNAL SUNSHINE and, for that matter, AMELIE, I’m not entirely convinced this is a great film after one viewing—there’s just so much to take in—but, like those films, I’m optimistic that subsequent viewings of MOOD INDIGO could reveal additional emotional facets beyond its many, many surface pleasures. 4.5 cats
“(This film screened at the 12th annual Independent Film Festival of Boston; a theatrical release is scheduled for this July)”
Jason says: “I haven’t seen every movie that Michel Gondry has made, but I’m reasonably confident that, barring some truly bizarre experimental shorts made early in his career, this is the Michel-Gondriest. While there are definite upsides to that, it also means that the film can be exhausting if you don’t absolutely love it, and that’s where I landed, fidgety and impatient by the end despite the American cut of the movie being a good half-hour shorter than I thought.
“It follows Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloe (Audrey Tautou), who meet at a party and fall in love, to eventually get married, although events on the honeymoon set the stage for less happy times. Anther couple of lesser note is Nicolas (Omar Sy), said to be Colin’s lawyer and adviser but mostly seen doing the work of a servant, and Isis (Charlotte Le Bon), who threw the party where the first two met; there’s also Chick (Gad Elmaleh), Colin’s best friend and devotee of author Jean-So Partre (Philippe Torreton), and Alise (Aïssa Maïga), Nicholas’s niece.
“To say that Colin and Chloe meet at this party makes it sound like something much more exciting than it is. They are pointed at each other by Nicolas and Chloe and just sort of fall in together. There are cute moments and whimsy to the set-up, but it’s emblematic of the rest of the movie that Colin and Chloe don’t actually do anything. Nobody does much throughout the entire movie except Nicolas, who does so many types of things with so little apparent effort that it barely registers beyond a running joke. People will declare their love and devotion quite earnestly in exchanges that the audience has heard many times before, but they seldom show it in an individual way or even have personality traits that can be seen to connect with each other.
“As such, the cast does what they can with what they’re given. Audrey Tautou has built a career out of playing this sort of elfin, quirky character, and while Chloe is no Amelie Poulain, she’s at least enjoyable to watch in the part. Romain Duris plays the manic one, and it’s rather overdone much of the time, but still energetic enough to enjoy. Omar Sy charms the heck out of the viewer in just about every scene he’s in. Gad Elmaleh hits his target as the obsessive Chick, but it’s not an interesting one. Aïssa Maïga and especially Charlotte Le Bon are sadly underused, especially the latter; Isis is a real nothing in this movie.
“They’re constantly upstaged by the nutty environment, which isn’t the harshest critique you can give them: Pretty much every minute of this movie has some bit of animation, design, or whimsy that can impress the audience or elicit a grin on its own – there’s the strange devices that Colin events, a mouse in the apartment played by a man in a Halloween costume, and Gondry’s retro visualizations of things like a printing press or a search network are delightful. The ‘one every minute’ estimate may be understating it, though, and there’s not exactly a cohesive logic that holds these things together. It often feels like Gondry has taken every weird idea he hasn’t had a place for in the past decade and poured it into this film until it was full, and sometimes even when the idea itself is amusing, one just wishes he’d get to the point.
“If there’s a point to get to. During much of the first act, I was mentally pegging the silliness as unreality as a sort of representation of the lives of the likes of Colin, who apparently lives off a trust fund – everything is easy and a source of amusement in this fantasy world until real hardship enters his life, at which point the tone of the movie would change. And while this does happen, it’s mostly a change to new eccentricity as opposed to feeling like Colin suddenly needs to have his feet on the ground, or the world becoming dark and scary beyond the characters’ abilities to comprehend. When things of some consequence do happen, they’re random, abrupt, and unsatisfying, even as tragedy.
“Maybe that isn’t be the case in the original cut, and I’d be curious to see if an extra half-hour or so lets the weirdness breathe and fleshes out the characters. I don’t enjoy sitting through a movie with so much to recommend it, one fairly bursting with creativity, feeling little more than worn out. 2.5 cats
“Seen 14 August 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP).”