His whimsy reserves at last replenished after his draining work on The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry is back at full childlike wonderment for Mood Indigo, starring Audrey Tautou, Romain Duris, and aggressively-charming dream logic.
The director has been pretty busy as of late--a comically-large, latex hand-ful of gumdrops giving him the energy to do an animated short about a hair-cutting mouse, and supposedly a hand-animated Noam Chomsky documentary--but judging by this trailer, Mood Indigo (or L'écume des jours, which does not quite translate to that) looks to be his most expectedly-offbeat feature in some time.
This first look is in French, but even for non-speakers, it seems to get the basic idea across: there's love, there's sadness, there's an underwater wedding, a conveyor belt of typewriters, and cars made of plexiglass and clouds. And according to the official synopsis, there is also a water lily growing in Tautou's lung. In other words, on the Audrey Tautou Scale of Delightfully-Eccentric Romance, this thing has wrecked the curve. Amélie will now be taking this class again with The Da Vinci Code.
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When Michel Gondry's new film about kids on a bus was recently revealed to be about kids on an ACTUAL bus--not kids in a cardboard box with crude stop-motion cotton candy exhaust--it had me a little concerned that maybe Gondry had paid all his hand-drawn Whimsy Dollars for the rights to direct The Green Hornet. Not the case! As it turns out, he'd just been saving his most eccentrically Gondry-esque transportation vessels for his upcoming Mood Indigo. Above, you can see one of the first photos from the film, and that is, to my eye, a fucking cloud car with a bubble dome and a toe. And these other vehicles from the film are nothing to fancifully sneeze at either:
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How adorable is Audrey Tautou as a youngish Coco Chanel? Cuter than everything? Except for Amelie, yes---and I don't just say that because I have a strange, repressed, Reservoir Dogs fetish. It's because Audrey Tautou is cuteness in its pure, synthesized form: a raw rock of puppy that you also want to sleep with.
Tautou as Chanel [JoBlo]
With its iconic poster still adorning the walls of countless young women's rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany's still remains outside the vicious world of remakes for now--at least until Gap needs someone new to shill pants. Pierre Salvadori has, however, made a "fresh re-imagining" of the story, alluding to as much with a Tiffany Blue poster and a fresh, new, black-dressed Audrey. Tautou's overwhelming cuteness forbids me from pre-judging this too much, but if they hope to compare to the original, they'd better have a mighty powerful racist stereotype to compete with Mickey Rooney.
'Priceless' Poster Premiere [Cinematical]
