When asked how he went about adapting Boris Vian’s 1947 novel ‘Froth on the Daydream’ Mood Indigo’s director Michel Gondry said “I was asked about five years ago to start to think about making it, but to be honest, I think that when I read it 30 years ago, I’d already started to adapt it. Like, when you read a book, you sort of visualise it? Even though I had no ambition to become a film director, I had some images that got stuck in my mind. So when I was asked a few years ago to direct the film, I had these images come back into my head. So it was a parallel between the first reading and the new reading, and those images combined with each other.”
Mood Indigo is simultaneously pleasant and shocking, with Technicolor whimsy drifting effortlessly into the dark miasma of an avant-garde nightmare. Make no mistake when you look at the poster for Mood Indigo, which is mischievously deceiving, with its joyous and carefree eccentricity. The journey of its two protagonists Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloé (Audrey Tautou) is wonderfully and intensely played out.
Plot
Set in Paris, but not as we know it, it’s like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in city form. All is sweet and rosy when we meet Colin, a handsome and effervescent man, who lives a rich and joyous life with his inventive cook Nicolas (Omar Sy) and bookish friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh). After Chick professes his love for Nicolas’ niece Alise (Aïssa Maïga) Colin’s desire for love becomes his raison d’être.
As the surrealist magic continues, Colin happens upon the beautiful and carefree Chloé, at his friends dog’s birthday party. A romance blossoms between the two, they fall head-over-heels in love and get married. All is sweet with the couple until their honeymoon, when a waterlily floats into their room from an open window, drifting into a slumbering Chloé’s mouth and settling on her right lung.
The lily begins to grow, and as her condition worsens it’s essential that she be surrounded by flowers to ease the pain. This bright and magical world of dreams starts to fade, and a harsh reality of financial troubles and social unrest replaces it, with the characters lives changing forever in the process.
Music
Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” is the films opening music, a fine and resplendent tune to lull us into a false sense of security. It’s good to think of Mood Indigo in two parts, in part one we’re spoilt by a wealth of brilliantly nostalgic jazz and acoustic love songs. Part 2, as the darkness takes hold and suffocates happiness, the music seeks only to enhance the tragedy that is unfolding before our eyes.
Étienne Charry cast an emotional spell over the soundtrack that is simply outstanding. His decision to include Duke Ellington into the mix was a master stroke, along with Mia Doi Todd’s heart lifting “Spring”. Charry relied heavily on strings, which did the job in enhancing the emotional impact.
Aesthetics
I felt Mood Indigo was the first film since Wes Anderson’s ‘The Life Aquatic’ to really use the, much underrated, art of stop-motion to its full potential. In part one, it was stop-motion that played an equal role with the primary coloured scenery, they both did their part in creating this candy like carousal. With the films focal point being love, Paris acts as a protective bubble for the couple, reality and fantasy are inseparable, so the aesthetic is heavily crafted with symbolism, in every aspect.
On Colin’s apartment, a world of experimentation, Gondry said “We built an apartment that was shrinking little by little. We moved the walls, we put the ceiling lower. We had to shoot in order and changed the space a little bit every day.” It’s this level of attention Gondry pays to his films aesthetics, just as he did in 2004 with ‘Eternal Sushine of the Spotless Mind’ that increases both the joy and the sadness.
Mood Indigo is a wildly hypnotic adaption of Boris Vian’s classic novel. With love being merely the centre-point for a wealth of other themes, from Orwellian nightmares to childlike wonder.