Even if you have a high tolerance for whimsy, “Mood Indigo” may still be too much.
This story of the heavenly then piercing love between Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloé (Audrey Tautou) is one-stop-shopping for the types of visual and emotional effects that the director’s fans might call Gondryisms. As in “Mind” and “Human Nature” and “The We and the I,” the filmmaker creates surreal or flat-out fantastic images, but with old-fashioned special effects: stop-motion, miniatures that are obviously miniatures, people in costumes that are obviously costumes, highly symbolic tableaus that are built and lit and blocked like stage sets, and so forth. Then he photographs it all in ways that tell your brain, “This is a thing that happened in front of this camera, and we just happened to catch it.” That creates a cognitive dissonance that’s often lovely, and dreamlike in its unnerving matter-of-factness.
The problem here is that the images are yoked to a story that seems to have been meant (at one time, anyway) as cutting satire, as a comment on the disconnect between the upper classes and everybody else. Gondry can’t or won’t reconcile the critical aspects of the story with …read more