the solitary review

A note on the film ‘Mood Indigo’ (“L’Écume des Jours”) by Michel Gondry, 2013

With Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Gad Elmaleh, Omar Sy.

This film is inspired by the short novel “L’Ecume des Jours” (“The Froth of Days”) by Boris Vian (1920-59), in which, according to its author, “A man and a woman love each other, and then she dies. ” However, it is a completely surreal story, where water lilies grow in lungs, and a house shrinks as its inhabitant becomes poor.

And there is always the jazz, necessary in Vian but which is lacking in several films where it is should be. Also as oddly modified Peugeot cars, like a transparent limousine – which is in the novel, when Colin and Chloe go on honeymoon – and conforms to the style of the text with its mechanical-biological chimeras – by example a “modified rabbit… you keep whatever function you want.” Vian was an engineer as well as a novelist and jazz musician.

The impulsive style of the first part of the film won't appeal to everyone, but it suitable for the journey that we the public take at the same time as the characters of the story – that their world is ideal only for a few well-to-do young people at the top – the ‘Froth’ of the original title, perhaps, and it turns out to be pretty dystopian otherwise.

When Colin has to find a job to pay Chloe's medical bills he finds himself in a world deprived and full of misery. It's a world full of religion – like the France of the 1940s and 1950s when the novel appeared – and the religious are mostly followers of a strange and apparently harmful morality, a world where as in “L’Arrache-Coeur” – another novel by Vian, published in 1953 – “God is luxury. “

Gondry’s film is the third time the novel has been adapted for the screen – the first film being the well-known 1968 version by Charles Belmont – Marie-France Pisier and Jacques Perrin in the roles of Chloé and Colin – and then in 2001 the Japanese Go Riju made “Chloé” with Nagase Masatoshi and Tomosaka Rie.

I found that Gondry brought the strange and overwhelming atmosphere of Vian's world to life. Although the characters are not deep – maybe this is on purpose – the world they inhabit comes true: which results in a stylized film and little to the taste of a large part of the audience, but faithful to its origins. .