After interestingly taking on the subject of teenage friendships in 2012’s The We and the I, Michel Gondry – he who made both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Green Hornet, somehow – reverted back to his French origins for an adaptation of Boris Vian’s wildly imaginative 1947 novel L’Ecume des jours, which translates to Foam of the Daze or Froth on the Daydream depending on who translates it. And beyond just having a Gondry-esque title, it seems as if the director was put on this planet specifically to bring these illusory images to life.
Somehow there are even more enchanting images here than there were in Mood Indigo’s first trailer we showed you a few months back, and this one even has subtitles, even though it’s hard to read words while stars Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou are flying around in a mini-cloud spaceship thing. You say this film is in French? What?
Beneath all the sideways stairs walking is an emotional tale of the fast-paced love life of Colin and Chloe, whose lovely – and underwater – marriage ceremony is soon followed by the diagnosis that Chloe has a water lily growing in her stomach, a condition which has only one treatment: surrounding the person with flowers. Colin soon sees his expansive wealth whittled away to nothing, which is mirrored by the relationship of his friends Chick (Gad Elmaleh) and Alise (Aissa Maiga), who experience a strange batch of problems on their own.
There is so much going on with perspectives, this actually looks a lot more like Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich than Eternal Sunshine, but it’s all in keeping with the Charlie Kaufman flavor. I wonder if Boris Vian is an anagram for Charlie Kaufman in some parallel universe.
Mood Indigo released this week in Belguim and France, but sadly doesn’t have any U.S. release dates set. But you can bet this hallucinatory film will hit VOD and tiny theaters at some point in the next few months.
