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Jul 18, 2014 By Shawn Hazelett Michel Gondry

Mood Indigo is a strange, uneven, but never boring film that can essentially be broken into two parts. The first—a paper-thin romance where a Parisian playboy Colin (Romain Duris) demands a girlfriend and immediately happens upon the beautiful Chloe (Audrey Tautou)—is embarrassingly void of substance, but provides a more than serviceable palate for Gondry’s visual antics. To name a few: centipede doorbells, a cocktail-concocting piano, and sushi that crawl on to and off of dinnerware. Their courtship includes a dance that shatters several laws of physics (and even more laws of physiology) and a date where Colin pilots a cloud on an overhead tour of Paris.

The stars align and the relationship accelerates into marriage, but not long after comes a crisis: Chloe has a water lily growing in her lung. Yes, this is a serious illness that will eventually become life-threatening, thus setting the tone for the second half of the film where shit unilaterally gets real. Gone are the swan clouds, sunshine, suits, and smiles, replaced with hospital bills, day jobs, cobwebs, dark corridors, and suicidal thoughts. Gondry’s visual panache struggles to stay afloat in such bleak waters and will never quite get the chance to swim ashore (it should be noted that the US version is nearly a half hour shorter than France’s). Still, though the film lacks the depth that constitutes Gondry’s best work, Mood Indigo works to showcase the visual extraordinaire’s most inventive and enchanting filmmaking in a decade.

drafthousefilms.com/film/mood-indigo

MOOD INDIGO – Official theatrical trailer from Drafthouse Films on Vimeo.

Author rating: 5.5/10