Starring: Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Omar Sy
Wealthy and carefree, Colin (Duris) leads a life of leisure amidst his adventures with his politically-aware friend Chick (Gad Elmahleh) and his chef Nicolas (Sy) as well as spending time inventing the Pianocktail (a piano that mixes different drinks together to make a cocktail depending on what's being played). At a party he makes the acquaintance of the cheery Chloé (Tautou) and they begin a romance that is derailed when Chloé contracts a strange illness.
In contemporary French cinema, few directors raise more interest than Michel Gondry. Having made his name with his strange but immaculately-detailed music videos and parlaying that into success with feature films like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) Gondry's style lies amongst the quirkiest of modern filmmakers alongside the likes of Wes Anderson and Terry Gilliam. In adapting Boris Vian's L'écume Des Jours, Gondry's work makes for imaginative viewing but perhaps a few eccentricities too many.
With Mood Indigo, Gondry achieves a rather precarious balancing act. From the start, we're treated to an array of stop-motion effects akin to Henry Selick, whilst also odd little parts of this fictionalised Paris that kind of bring to mind a chocolate-box sweet take on Alphaville (1965). The parts of Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou (who have previously worked together in a series of films by Cédric Klapisch) work well against the backdrop. Duris looks the carefree playboy, Tautou has always had a way of being extremely sweet and endearing.
The problem is that for all its warmth and humanity that it could (and does) convey, the stylised craziness of it all serves largely as a bizarre distraction. A man in a mouse costume scampers around at a mouse's size amidst much of the action and a dance move that involves inhumanly elongated legs is given quite a lot of precedence. There are some ideas that are amusing in their surreality like a DJ for a skating rink that wears a crow mask, moving beak and all or a TV chef that inspects the viewer's cooking and hands them ingredients, but the film seems more of an exercise in eccentricity than in storytelling and it gets old.
Mood Indigo is a fairly brief film, 94 minutes end-to-end, and spends its time hammering in exactly what needed to be done. Gondry wants to give an unusual but romantic film and indeed he gives us a romantic and definitely unusual film. The problem is that even being concise, it wears out its kooky charm a little too much with the film ultimately surviving on the under-played performances and the best of the over-played aesthetics,
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