Mood Indigo is a visual treat that aims no further than its
visual inventiveness. It has the
completely predictable narrative of an opera – boy meets girl, they marry, she
dies – but if the focus of opera is music, the creativity here is visuals. It’s a thrill to watch how Gondry embellishes
this thin story line with outrageous creativity.
A lot of the visual strength here comes from Gondry’s
ability to violate categories and scale.
In Colin’s kitchen, Nicholas cooks from a video cookbook, but when the
right ingredientss aren't available, the video chef’s hand emerges from the screen
and hands them to Nicholas. Video in Mood Indigo doesn't remain a series of stimulated pixels but becomes physical reality. And there are other wild kitchen fantasies, too, including meals that assemble and dissemble themselves as well as eels coming
out of faucets. Gondry’s visuals can have
a logic of shape and form rather than reliance on typical cognitive categories. The same categorical violation lets Gondry
invent Colin’s pianocktail. which translates music to mixed drinks, and it's behind the weapons manufacturing that requires nude men to incubate the guns.
Another part of Gondry’s inventiveness comes from his
ability to play with space and scale.
The man in the mouse costume is the size of a mouse we'd see in everyday reality, a cloud-car
can tour Paris, and there’s a car race to the altar for the wedding of Colin
and Chloé with little automobiles racing through church stairwells and up walls
to get to the altar. And in all this
fantasy, Gondry is still happy to throw in some very recognizable barbs at the venality
of the church.
There is also a lot of recognizable play with materials
here. Feathers float as snow but act as
feathers when they land, and amid all the hard surfaces of Mood Indigo’s world,
Gondry chooses soft yarns when the camera goes into Chloé’s body and we
see her vulnerable organs. After their wedding, the newly-weds leave the church dressed but floating in water with bubbles around them. Throughout the film, a textural
richness amplifies the creativity of its images.
There is also multi-leveled self-referentiality at work in Mood
Indigo. The film opens with a view of
rows of people on typewriters, the typewriters moving along each row from one typist
to the next. This scene suggests Brazil
and evokes the complexity of Terry Gilliam, whose inventiveness would be quite
at home in this film. There’s no manifest causal link between the story of Colin and Chloé, though viewers are clearly
invited to try to make one, and the possibility of such a connection is completely void when we see Colin himself trying to type, apparently wanting to save Chloé
by writing. The mise en abyme here is a
purely aesthetic pleasure.
Viewers wanting character arcs and plot twists are certain
to be disappointed in Mood Indigo because Gondry has little interest in these
elements of cinematic storytelling.
Instead, this film is an intense imaginative engagement with a series of
poses, poses which follow the most basic of narratives. For viewers inclined to marvel at ingenious
visual creativity, Mood Indigo will be a treat.
And at moments, it can even touch the fragile heart in us all.
