Anyone familiar with Michel Gondry’s recent Hollywood films would be gobsmacked by Mood Indigo, a lovely but utterly surrealist twist on an old tale. It’s hard to imagine the director of The Green Hornet and Be Kind Rewind putting together something quite as odd and delicate as this – although those who remember the heady swirl and triumph of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind will be better able to adjust to Gondry’s blithely strange take on Boris Vian’s 1947 novel L’Écume Des Jours (Froth On The Daydream).
Colin (Romain Duris) is happy, healthy and wealthy enough not to have to work. He spends his days chatting with his best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh) and lawyer/mentor/buddy Nicolas (Omar Sy), and inventing cheerful little contraptions like his ‘pianocktail’ – a piano wired to brew a cocktail out of the music it plays. At a party, he meets Chloé (Audrey Tautou), and they dance and romance their way into marriage. All is wonderful until Chloé falls ill: a water lily is growing in her lungs, and the only way she can be treated – to be surrounded with fresh flowers everyday – is prohibitively expensive for Colin and his dwindling coffers.
Mood Indigo is, in a word, delightful. If it had been filmed in a completely straightforward way, with Chloé suffering from a far less exotic ailment, the movie would be boring – its plot thin and predictable. But, because the romance between Colin and Chloé unfolds in a universe in which doorbells clatter noisily to life and sunbeams turn into solid threads of white light, it feels bright, fresh and endlessly charming. The surrealist bent of this cinematic universe – one that hums to the jazz of Duke Ellington (whose songs provide both the English title of the film and Chloé’s name) – adds a touch of very welcome magic to the love story. It’s the kind of glorious flight of fancy that one hardly ever encounters in romantic comedies these days, except in painfully manufactured chunks.
The film showcases an enchanting array of offbeat ideas: from the constantly rotating typing pool that tells the story even as we watch it onscreen, through to the pet mouse (played by actor Sacha Bourdo in a mouse costume) that has free run of Colin’s house. As Nicolas’ elaborate meals waltz across the table and everyone’s legs bend and elongate for the most fashionable dance of the moment, it’s incredible to think that the film – impressive, breathtaking production design and all – was made on a meagre budget (by Hollywood standards) of approximately US$26 million.
It’s true that the characters feel somewhat underwritten: the supporting characters, in particular, exist only to fill their appointed roles, such as Chick’s expensive and all-consuming obsession with celebrity intellectual Jean-Sol Partre (a sly reference, of course, to Vian’s own philosopher friend, Jean-Paul Sartre). But the cast is good enough to make up for it. Sy and Elmaleh are wonderfully droll, especially when Chick and Nicolas meet their own respective love interests in the form of Alise (Aïssa Maïga) and Isis (Charlotte Le Bon).
More importantly, Duris and Tautou are a gift: they look great onscreen, of course, but they also share a sweet, believable chemistry that helps gloss over the deficiencies of the script. Tautou is so effervescent that her charm remains intact even when her character is forced into the role of a sickly invalid in the second half of the film. Duris treads the fine line between comedy and tragedy with ease, exuding joy and also misery as Colin’s life takes an unexpected turn for the better – and then, invariably, the worse.
Many viewers might be turned off by the endless inventiveness showcased in Mood Indigo, yearning instead for a more grounded story and characters who are less flighty and feather-light than the ones we meet. But it’s hard to argue with the many and various delights of Gondry’s film, many of which are purely cinematic. What other film would dare to take a race to the altar very literally, or bleed quietly into monochrome when a character’s heart breaks?
Summary: As inventive, sweet and sombre as a Duke Ellington song.
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
Shawne Wang