Mood Indigo (2013)

How sad is this?

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I think Michel Gondry meant for this to be his masterpiece, but, man, is it ever a mess. There's so much imagination, so many wonderful images, and everything's in service to such a nothing plot with paper-thin characters. The story is your basic "boy meets girl, girl inhales snowflake on wedding night, develops water lily in lung, becomes deathly ill" kind of thing. Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou are the boy and girl. They have various friends, but they don't have much character and don't do anything. This could probably be included among the worst movies of the past year, but, as I said, it has some marvelous images and hand-made special effects. I still feel like Gondry could find his way and make a good movie, but he really needs to focus and not just let his imagination run wild. For the record, I did watch the 130 minute French version, not the 94 minute American release. Even at 130 minutes it still feels like half the script was edited out!

I suffered this movie for the first hour. I saw it in a local art house. There were 10 people in the audience. After 30 minutes, the first 3 left. 15 minutes later 2 more left. After and hour, I left. It was the stupidest film I've seen in years. Waste of time.I get there is a book that I hadn't read but, still, the movie should speak for itself. I didn't find anything about the first hour to be clever or creative. It seemed like a random mix of shots and angles by someone on an acid trip. I don't pretend to be some kind of hot shot movie expert but, as a member of our area film society, I do see about 40 films per year. I've seen good films and bad films. This was just a stupid film.I hated it.

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 on screen, 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 on screen, 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 indeed, or bleed quietly into monochrome when a character's heart breaks?

I love strange movies, but apart from Eternal Sunshine, Gondry has been more miss than hit for me. And this is probably the biggest miss for me. The effects in this started out as distracting. Even jarring. "HEY LOOK AT ANOTHER OF THESE WONDERFULLY QUIRKY ANIMATIONS! AREN'T YOU FEELING THE QUIRKY, HAPPY, WONDERFULLNESS YET? HEY, HEY! LOOK AT IT! FEEL HAPPY AND QUIRKY GODDAMMIT!!! And before the ten minute mark, they became tedious. For almost an hour I sat there wondering why I was supposed to feel anything for these shallow two-dimensional characters. Heck. There wasn't even any particular setbacks for anyone until Chloe started to faint. And by that time I was way beyond even caring. Well. I should probably add that the version we showed at our local art-house-cinema was the 94 minute version. Maybe the 124 min cut doesn't feel nearly as slapped haphazardly together. Or maybe they cut out 30 min of tedium. I don't know. All I do know is that I barely made it through this one and my interest isn't exactly piqued for a longer sit. Again, I love movies with strange elements. Making my brain go WTF did someone put in my soft-drink? But for me there needs to be some semblance of timing and storytelling momentum. Not just, Hey I know, let's have five more scenes of them fighting the stop-motion doorbell spider while smiling happy and quirky faces without it adding anything of value to the plot. Why? Because it's quirky! Do we need another reason? You know. During watching this film I realized I just don't care for "quirky". It does absolutely nothing for me. Adds nothing and becomes a tedious chore to sit through yet another HAPPY HAPPY STRANGE AND Wonderful SET-PIECE. FEEL THE HAPPY GODDAMMIT! No. I do not feel the happy. I instead feel like bitter old fart for not enjoying what is so clearly supposed to be a wonderful moment. And any movie that makes me feel like a bitter old fart gets a low rating from me... Wow... starting out I didn't realize I could muster up this much of emotion to describe my experience. I should probably stop now. Yes... just stop. If you love "quirky" and Tatou. Then you'll probably love this. Because there's just a sh**-ton of that. If you don't. Get ready for tedium.