Inside Out: Mood Indigo
Michel Gondry is master of the weird and wonderful, and it’s rare that a film these days can be both of those things. Bleeding-edge experiments can be harrowing or alienating for some, while the ‘wonderful’ side is often confined to sometimes-vanilla mainstream fare or even just children’s films. You shouldn’t have to be under twelve or possess a high tolerance for avant-garde to watch a film with your jaw hung open smiling, and the surrealistic Mood Indigo will do just that.
I was lucky enough to see it at the Sydney Film Festival years ago, and I’ve been in love since then, as I’m sure you will be. The perfect mix of emotional connection and artistic innovation is struck, and the result is one of the most extraordinary films I’ve ever seen.
A one sentence plot summation has more strange beauty than most films hope to achieve in two hours’ running time: a newlywed couple’s happiness is threatened when the woman contracts an unusual illness; a water lily begins to grow in her lungs.
Gondry and Luc Bossi adapted the screenplay from Boris Vian’s novel, and the result is a firework of joy and energy. Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris play the two leads, Chloe and Colin, and they have a perfect kind of innocence and universality. They’re like every pair of lovers than has ever been. The performances of their knockabout group of friends more than match their joy; the standout being Nicolas, played by most-charming-man-alive Omar Sy. Etienne Charry’s original score creates the world, combining perfectly with the visuals. And what visuals they are.
The circus of Stephane Rosenbaum’s production design, Pierre Renson’s art direction, Christophe Beaucarne’s cinematography and Florence Fontaine’s costuming, all presided over by rollicking ringmaster Monsieur Gondry is maybe the most striking and beautiful visual world I’ve seen to be put on screen. Every set, prop, costume, effect, blocking move and frame is perfect – it looks like a Dadaist junk shop but you know everything is meticulously thought out. I’ve never wanted to live in a film as much as this one. Absolutely everything is twisted with magic.
Even if you’re disinterested in the story or feeling (which you won’t be if you have a functioning heart), simply staring at all the insane beauty would still be a better experience than other entire films. Being overwhelmed with delights you’ve never even thought of is half the fun, so I will not spoil it for you, but this should give you a small taste of what you’re in for: oven baked canapés served in tiny toy ovens that you must open to get to the food, a leather glove folded into a puppet of a puppy, a screen split between sun and rain, a cloudmobile for lovers to hire, a chef living in your appliances to help with the cooking, and the Internet being made of people working simultaneously on rainbow coloured typewriters. And all those are momentary concepts in the least, entire scenes and settings range from a go-kart cathedral to a cobweb swamp of sorrow to Colin’s kaleidoscopic apartment built in an old train carriage.
But this isn’t all a ploy or gimmick to distract from the humanity of the story. Even if it was, its ingenuity would place it among top-class works anyway. This film uses its zany nature to get into our hearts. The surrealism and exaggeration echo the sensations of emotion; when you’re in love, you do feel like you’re floating on your own little cloudmobile; or grief does seem to make everything black and white.
This was all I could think after seeing Mood Indigo: it turns the world inside out. All of us see our normal surroundings through the strangeness inside their head – the lens of how they feel and make sense of things or dream and imagine a certain way. This film takes that sensory emotion and imagination and turns it out, making the world out of it. “You feel like you and your lover are on your own little cloud? Great, let’s give you an actual cloud to fly around in!” That’s how this film’s flawless artistic elements blend with more usual cinematic humanity to create something surreal and real at the same time.
We are in our world, but we could see it like theirs. Our ways of seeing and feeling are as strange and beautiful as any world filmmakers could create, and that’s why they can create them. Joy and dreaming and wonder and love and worry and disappointment all blossom within us. Like a water lily in our lungs.
