French filmmaker Michel Gondry has demonstrated time and again that, despite his prodigious visual imagination, he can’t tell a decent story, which might explain why his best features to date have been a fantasy scripted by Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and an illustrated interview with Noam Chomsky (Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?). This screen adaptation of Froth on the Daydream, the 1947 cult novel by Boris Vian, ranks alongside such captivating/frustrating Gondry efforts as The Science of Sleep (2006) and Be Kind Rewind (2008) in its wild gags (most impressively, an elaborate office set worthy of Jacques Tati in which seated typists peck away at rotating rings of manual typewriters), cutie-pie performances (from Romain Duris and the oppressively adorable Audrey Tautou), and flighty narrative (the Tautou character is slowly dying from a lily that’s growing in one of her lungs). In French with subtitles.
Mood Indigo
1 hour 34 min • 2013
