Review: MOOD INDIGO (2013)

Depending on your feelings towards director Michel Gondry’s style of cinematic whimsy, the first 20 minutes of Mood Indigo might be a living hell. It was for me, at least. Those opening minutes where we’re introduced to independently wealthy layabout Colin (Romain Duris) and his Paris apartment overstuffed with tiny men in mice costumes, and inventions halfway between Rube Goldberg machines and something out of a Bosco cartoon, felt like the director cranking up his brand of colorful excess up to terminal levels. By the time the eternally pixiesh Audrey Tautou’s character Chloé arrived on the scene, all wide eyes and sly smiles at a birthday party for a poodle, I was ready to bail.

What’s the Futurama joke? “I love his boyish charm but hate his childishness.”

But Gondry does something incredibly interesting here, turning out his own style as a way to use the sweet to hide the bitter – and Mood Indigo – adapting Boris Vian’s L’écume des jours – is a bitter movie full of hurt and loss, anchored by a cast that moves effortlessly between the complicated tone shifts that the material demands.

It starts – as most movies with Tautou do – with a meet cute. Well, that’s not true. It starts with rows of workers at typewriters, passing passing along pages of a story in progress from station to station as the narrator brings us into Colin’s world: his cozy little apartment attended by his manservant Nicholas (Omar Sy, X-Men: Days of Future Past) as Colin builds worries over the construction of his piano that also makes cocktails (be careful with the foot pedal which dispenses raw egg or hot omelet if the rhythm is too “hot”).

This is the Michel Gondry of Be Kind, Rewind or The Science of Sleep: and endlessly talented filmmaker whose visuals crowd out the actual emotion. By the time we meet Colin’s best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh) and his beautiful girlfriend Alise (Aïssa Maïga), Mood Indigo feels almost desperate to sell us its characters’ sunny lives. And then Colin meets Chloé, and the two fall in love.

And then they marry, things take a turn, and illness, poverty, and hurt intrude on their colorful and sunny world. Gondry, with the help of his cast, shows the sunshine become dull, the cute little machines becoming something sinister, and the perfect little loves of French comedies colliding with real life. And god, is it bleak.

Let me stop here and say that Mood Indigo doesn’t work because it’s bleak: I think the beauty of Gondry’s work in general is in how in love with life it seems to be. And that’s the case for the first half of the film: when we have a little money in our pockets and we’re in love, the quality of the light is a little better, and anything seems possible. This is the half of the movie where bird-headed announcers run the local skating rink, where a jitterbug turns dancers into a tangle of 7-foot-long legs and where Chick’s obsession with a noted French writer is a charming quirk for the broke engineer.

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films

That other half, after Chloé contracts an illness from a water lily growing in her lung, bitter and defeated. Gondry is ruthless with us here: the perpetually youthful Nicolas begins to gray at his temples while Colin struggles to make ends meet as the medical bills pile up. Gondry doesn’t pull back on the stylization: there’s still a little man in a mouse costume at the margins of the screen and the action still pulses and throbs with strangle little inventions in the forefront, for instance, the giant face-for-a-platform where blowhard philosopher Jean-Sol Partre (Philippe Torreton) delivers his impenetrable edict.

The beauty of Gondry’s film is that it uses one type of movie – the frothy fantasy romance – to sell another kind of movie, one about very real, very human love and loss. Mood Indigo is both beautiful and a cruel, wrenching gut-punch.

Mood Indigo is now playing in L.A. with select cities to follow. You can find ticketing information at Drafthouse Films.