A cinema all of one's own. How refreshing to observe a filmmaker making unrestrained, unrestricted use of the tools at his disposal to realise his most fantastical artistic ambitions. Michel Gondry embarks on his most frivolous flight of fancy yet in Mood Indigo, a film so fraught with thoughts and details that it can go from delightful and delectable to diabolical in mere seconds. Over its full runtime, Gondry achieves something similar with the film entire, literally sapping the colour and the energy from it, smoothly and swiftly transforming something ineffably effervescent into something melancholy, even cruelly so. This is a transition that Gondry makes delicately, and where his inventiveness will not suffice to carry the film any longer, he reveals an appreciation for human emotion that's often absent from his cinematic creations. Mood Indigo receives its classical narrative structure from its decades-old literary source, and though Gondry navigates this easily, it's an archaic sequence of events that has been bestowed upon a film that strives to be wholly modern. Were he less occupied with finding novel ways of achieving that modernisation within the context of this story arc (which becomes harder to disguise the further it progresses), his striving might not have gone so much to waste. Yet all fragments of this busy, often brilliant film, have qualities of their own. In fact, though it's far from fair to discredit the innovation Gondry displays most prominently in the film's opening act, Mood Indigo's start is its weakest, in the moment. He rather overplays the fantasy elements, and over-embellishes his creation - it doesn't completely come off as the wondrous wizardry it's intended to, and Gondry ends up looking like a major try-hard. But at least he's trying hard to achieve a cinema all of his own. For all that it didn't work for me, I'm sure it works terrifically for him. It's auteurism run wilder than wild, and that is, in 2014, rather refreshing.
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