Film Carew

Midway through Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo, Romain Duris and Audrey Tatou are wed, at a ceremony that dwells at the very centre of both the film's narrative and its sentiment. In one of the most beautiful cinematic depictions of love ever dreamt-up, when the paramours 'take the plunge' they're suddenly, literally, underwater; endlessly giddy in a soundless, fluid world in which reality has receded. It's a moment of profound beauty that lingers, the emotional apex from which things will, soon thereafter, begin to descend. When the priest bids that they be “happy together, safe from family and work,” it's a near-throwaway gag loaded with meaning; both serving as ill-portent and speaking theme aloud. Gondry's latest film explores a most Gondryist conceit: attempting to live your life as a kind of walking daydream, a non-stop carnival of sugary creativity and handcrafted whimsy, in which you're surrounded only by the joys of intellectual peers, inspiring artworks, and the potency of your shared imagination. And, inevitably, how that attempt is doomed to failure. No imaginary world can insulate you from reality, from the march of time and the scourge of tragedy. There's a reason that marriage vows are 'til death.

Back in his whimsical wheelhouse after his depressing Green Hornet Hollywood sellout, Gondry is at his most Gondryish; seeming, at times, on the precipice of self-parody. The source-text - an idiosyncratic post-war novel by Boris Vian, riddled with wordplay and ridiculous surrealism - allows this master of music-video invention to go to town with manic monkeyshines: optical illusions, eye-tricking sets, bending lenses, jump-cuts, split-screens, and a cacophony of stop-motion. The flick kicks off with mad flurry of cutesiness, finding Duris as man-boy of bright smile and abundant privilege, tended to by Omar Sy's high-rolling lawyer, who unwinds from his career by serving as butler, making a flurry of dishes under the instruction of Alain Chabat's pseudo-celebrity-chef, a televised figure who effectively 'lives' in the kitchen's appliances. This beginning borders on an assault of tweeness: there's a man in a mouse costume, a hand-cranked spice-wheel, cavorting stop-motion dishes, all manner of archaic retro-cute technology, and a 'pianocktail', an invention in which whatever's tinkled on the ivories turns out a drink mixed to that tenor. Vian's jazz obsession sets the motif: major chords make for a nostalgic taste, minor chords stir up something more melancholy. When Duris's best friend, Gad Elmelah, plays Duke Ellington's Caravan —thereby beginning the film's titular riff on the Duke; which includes inventively-deployed vintage video and a turn from Kid Creole as Ellington - they debate how the drink turned out. Whether it tastes of 'bum notes' or 'personal interpretation' is, ultimately, decreed to be “a matter of taste.”

This line lingers, too. Mood Indigo is, though a potent concoction, certainly no perfect cocktail; some will perceive its zanier excesses as bum notes, others tasting admiration for Gondry's infectious enthusiasm. Having a 'reading' of the film complicated by the fact that Mood Indigo's initial festival cut ran at 130 minutes, only for it to get sliced down to a mere 96 for a theatrical screening. Gondry cited 'listening to criticisms' for the move, and, in truth, its heart and vision persists, with much of what has been lost being merely minor, throwaway gags; the film no longer featuring “Jetsus” the Jesus Jet takes off mid-wedding, or a Zucker-esque yucker in which a will is “executed” in a miniature electric chair. But even if none of the cuts border on mortal wound, it still feels like butchery. In one scene, Duris looks ruefully at a crowheaded-creature in a wheelchair (yes, crows, just roll with it), only in the theatrical-edit there's no longer the proceeding scene in which he was the one who, in a pique of panic and impotent rage, hospitalised the crowhead himself. The gleeful carnage of the original cut - sprays of blood and comically-gruesome meatgrinding - is absent, tamping down the surrealism. And a bravura, high-tragic scene involving fire, a melting car, and a painful death is just gone, excised into the ether. Even Gondry's son, Paul, meets an ungainly demise: he may be still listed in the credits as the 1st Doctor, but the 1st Doctor has been consigned to the cutting-room floor.

But what's missing, mostly, is the sense of rhythm that existed in Mood Indigo's original cut; in which the furious flurries of the hyper-twee opening suddenly still, and from there the film gets slower, darker, bleaker, stranger, more depressing; Gondry literally leeching the colour from the film until it ends in sombre black-and-white. The tempo matched the theme perfectly: the whirlwind of new love and the liberties of carefree youth existing at a manic pitch unsustainable; life, inevitably, becoming something rather resembling a grind. If audiences or critics reacted negatively to this change in tempo, it's sad that Gondry - whether pressured or not - bent in kind; attempting to move towards crowdpleasery rather than sticking to an edit that was stronger, more forceful, more interesting. Now, there's not slow descent, only a rush to the finish-line; the depth of the tragedy, and its inescapability, being robbed of much of its smothering power.

The tragedy comes in two forms: Elameh and his girlfriend, Aïssa Maïga, are hopelessly in thrall to the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, spending all their money on feeding their addiction to his work; these two essential junkies on a slide into self-destruction. Tatou suffers a different fate: mid-wedding night, at the apex of her jumping-on-the-bed-in-slow-motion happiness, a spore alights into her stop-motion/handicraft lung, and a water lily begins to grow there. This lily is a symbol for cancer, obviously; and it brings with it the real-world baggage that the once-carefree central couple never wanted to bear. There's medical bills, the need for a job (Vian viciously parodying workaday drudgery when Duris submits to a military-industrial job that involves lying on a heap of dirt for 24 hours), a house that once seemed full of life now reeking of death; neither enjoying playing patient or carer, their symbiosis a shared suffering that turns golden marriage into gloomy prison.

Throughout, themes of fate play out; an army of typists, working for 'The Administration', write the story as it goes; attempts by Maïga or Duris at commandeering their own narrative - and averting themselves from the pain of tending to someone felled by addiction of terminal illness - thwarted. Bad news is announced by those in control of the story a day in advance, as a courtesy (“tomorrow in the bath you'll fall and break your hip”) that doubles as commentary on temporality; in the way that humans live knowing that things will, eventually, end badly; that, no matter what joyous peaks your life hits, pain and suffering inevitably loom on the horizon.

The juxtaposition of the runamok whimsy of Gondry's vision and the japery of Vian's surrealism - currency called doublezoons; a limb-bending dance dubbed the biglemoi; the Administration and Partre gadding about in bizarre android-creature vehicles - with reality's grim spectre of death makes Mood Indigo a movie in which, it seems, two different ideas are colliding. But these thoughts seem more like bedfellows than enemies: the cruelty of mortality is tragedy, but comedy is just tragedy plus time; man's one real weapon against the awareness of death - the persistent melancholy of life as sentient mammal - being his sense-of-humour. Gondry fills the picture with people turning endless circles - be they in spiral staircases, ice-skating rinks, or revolving doors - as symbol for life's repetition; which sometimes feels like a merry-go-round, sometimes groundhog day, sometimes a downward spiral.

If a sense-of-humour is a way to combat death, so, too, is art, and it's no surprise that the film ends, tenderly, with its central love living on as a new narrative; no longer existing in reality, but persisting as an animation. For some, it may be but a cutesy end to a cutesy film, but Mood Indigo is a deep, complex work that dares to buck any such simplistic reductionism; a film whose unique take on life's most romantic and tragic moments is messy with humanity, smeared with surreality, and riddled by doubt. It may not match the majesty of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, the best film of the 2000s, but like Gondry's magnum opus it achieves a profound power by portraying something on screen that taps into what it means to be human, to feel human, to perceive the world, to rely on memory, and to stumble through dreams. Mood Indigo may not be a masterpiece, but it's one of the most singular films of 2013, and seems destined to be the year's most misunderstood movie.