Thus, Colin’s chaotic trailer-like apartment, which he shares with cook/lawyer/best friend, Nicolas ( Omar Sy, Intouchables), becomes a testing ground for various makeshift creatures and gadgets, as well as constantly morphing set designs that mimic the characters’ fledging relationship - the result being that you spend a lot more time watching the walls than the drama at hand, which is often hard to follow anyway. Yet Gondry seems much less interested in exploring the emotional repercussions of Colin and Chloe’s plight than in all the crazy concoctions he and production designer Stephane Rozenbaum can insert within a single scene or space. Once you manage to put aside all the clutter and noise - which is by no means an easy task - Mood Indigo actually tells a fairly classic boy-meets-girl sob story, where a kindhearted dreamer named Colin ( Romain Duris) crosses paths with a pretty, quick-witted gal named Chloe ( Audrey Tautou), and, after much wooing, manages to win her over.īut just when things seem to be peachy between them, Chloe contracts a dangerous pulmonary disease (caused by a lilypad growing in her lung - clearly an artsy metaphor for tuberculosis), forcing Colin to give up his bohemian lifestyle in order to pay for Chloe’s expensive medical treatments, one of which consists of rubbing dry flowers on her naked chest.

Yet instead of cutting some of the novel’s more absurd elements in order to focus on the romantic tragedy at its core, Gondry and co-writer/producer Luc Bossi have decided to take the writer’s words à la lettre, replicating his many literary flights-of-fancy and tossing in everything but the kitchen sink - although there’s one of those too…out of which pops a papier mâché eel (again, during the film’s opening sequence). Burroughs’ The Soft Machine into a sci-fi blockbuster, or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow into an HBO miniseries.

Granted, transforming Vian’s experimental 1947 book into a comprehensible narrative is a little like trying to turn William S.

The experience is rather like watching a very long, very expensive (the film was budgeted at €18M, or $23M) episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse that’s been co-directed by Terry Gilliam and Salvador Dali, and Gondry pummels the viewer with a two-hour-plus visual assault that’s easier to admire than it is to enjoy.Ī wide local rollout by Studiocanal should see strong first-frame returns, but this surreal semi-period piece has little staying power, while overseas action will be concentrated in Francophone territories and art house markets where the Gondry label still means something.

Mood Indigo by Boris Vian