The work of music-video-turned-feature-film director Michel Gondry is an acquired taste. Films such as The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are full of whimsy and surrealism, and to be enjoyed often require a strong appreciation for creativity and invention.
Mood Indigo, a film adapted from the cult French novel L'ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream), by Boris Vian, is a case in point. The story centres on Colin (Romain Duris), a charming and inventive young man, wealthy enough not to work, who lives an exuberant life in an extraordinary apartment.
Colin's days are spent eating artfully created exotic dishes whipped up by lawyer-cum-butler Nicolas (The Intouchables' Omar Sy) off a dining table sitting on roller-skates. Dishes aren't washed - they roll off a conveyer belt and smash on the floor, making way for the next meal of slithering fish or decadent desserts. Cocktails are dispersed by a Pianocktail - literally, a piano that makes cocktails, and a miniature mouse-man is responsible for doing the housework. It's all terribly kooky.
At a time when CGI and special effects rule the box office it's a delight to marvel in Gondry's man-made inventiveness.
When Colin meets the woman of his dreams Chloe (Audrey Tautou in Amelie- form here) they take a ride in a glass-domed cloud floating over Paris, and for their wedding day Colin buys her a Perspex limousine. It's telling though, that the art direction, set and prop design stay with you, with Gondry's surreal world threatening to overwhelm what happens within it.
