Mood Indigo “L’écume des jours” (15)
Director: Michel Gondry
Starring: Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Gad Elmaleh
Running time: 94 min
Wealthy, inventive bachelor Colin endeavors to find a cure for his lover Chloe after she’s diagnosed with an unusual illness caused by a flower growing in her lungs.
WHAT makes a good movie? Director, producer, money, players, lighting, script, plot, movement from reality to not on the spot…jot? Never start a review with a hypothetical question, or so I was taught. But at getting at the strengths of motion picture we must discuss all of the above.
Some movies are ticker-tape celebrations of brilliance in acting, direction, script, post-production and the hammering seduction of the people watching it. I hate writing bad reviews of something that many people have put two or three years of their lives to. But, this time, I have to.
Directed and co-written by Michael Gondry and adapted from Boris Vian’s novel, Froth of the Daydream, what we should have here is a magnificent piece of cinema. What’s put in front of the eyes is, I wasn’t counting the minutes, though I could feel a drop on the left side of my face and slabbers pouring down from my bake.
Thirty minutes in and I was dying to die. Considering Gondry’s other adaptations, such as the Academy Award Winning, Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it’s a rigour to figure how he managed to come up with such a dull pitch of a film. Yes, we have happiness, a drowning, theatre, tables on roller-boots and every other trick a producer and director can conjure but what we can’t lunge at is a follow-able plot.
Actors can only deliver so much, and with the main players, Romain Duris (The Beat My Heart Skipped) and Audrey Tautou (Coco Before Chanel), we’re offered a piece of manufactured script which seems to pitched by a thousand monkeys hitting qwerty at the thrill of will.
I’m counting my words now, knowing I should write between six and eight hundred. But I can’t. This movie is so pretentious and boring even tapping my fingers against a keyboard both hurts and hits my digits and soul. I shouldn’t be tapping while real life is happening. Are you getting the picture? Don’t go see this one.
I’ve read other reviews of this film; they must have been on some gear I’ve never been exposed to, or maybe they need to go SpecSavers. If your doctor won’t give you sedatives or if you’re a fantastic fanatic and fully insomniac praying for sleep, buy this film when it comes out on DVD and put on repeat.
Sleep well my friends.
A graven One Nerd out of Five
Irwin Fletcher
I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.
Nerd Comments