This is all astonishing. The sentence "How the hell did they do that?" appears more than once in my notes. The direction is indeed delightful, as long as you haven't gotten your fill during the first few minutes, or you're annoyed seeing social commentary eclipsed by goofy visual pirouettes, or you find Gondry's casting choices unfortunate, as I did. Many of the actors (but Tatou and Duris especially) are too old to be playing characters who might seem immature even if they'd been played by teenagers. The multicultural ensemble is problematic for different reasons. Kudos to Gondry for envisioning the main players as a racial/ethnic bomber crew, but I wish he'd thought harder about the implications of filling, for instance, the role of the hero's manservant and chef Nicolas with an actor of color (Omar Sy). Nicolas is an un-ironically eager-to-please, constantly smiling porter-type, ready to Drive Miss Daisy—a construct who'd make modern day audiences cringe were he to appear in, say, a film from the '40s. At one point Nicolas gets the main couple a room at an inn that we're told is full by having sex with the proprietor's teenaged daughter. The leads kid around with Nicolas as if he's a stereotypical buck who can't keep it in his pants, and Nicolas protests that he just did what he had to do to get the room. Where's Mel Brooks when you need him?
The deepest problem, though, is the one I alluded to higher up: This live-action cartoon has elements of scathing satire that are never fully committed to, much less realized. "Mood Indigo" is on some level about what happens to privileged white folks when their cash, identified here as "doublezoons," runs out, or when a major character is stricken with a debilitating (if storybook) illness, or when any reversal of fortune makes well-to-do leave the Edens they created or were born into. But Gondry doesn't seem to have the heart of a satirist, even though he has directed satirical or quasi-satirical material in the past. The cosmos seems to be punishing or at least randomly brutalizing his characters, but the director won't invite us into the heart of their misery and take a hard look at what, in a larger rhetorical sense, it all means. There's a disconnect between what's happening to these rich people (repeated smacks across the face, courtesy of our tough-loving pal Reality) and the tone of the movie, which continues to present Colin and Chloé and the gang as lovable, two-dimensional, smiling-and-cavorting man-children and woman-children, and their world as a wonderland that's a kick to vicariously experience.
The film's English-language title comes from a piece by Duke Ellington, who was godfather to Vian’s daughter, Carole. The whole story strives for the light, sweet but ultimately melancholy tone of Ellington's tune, which is used more than once here; but that tone is at odds with the satire, which gets smothered by the moon-sized marshmallow of Gondry's Gallic cuteness. When a film keeps telling you, over and over, inadvertently or on purpose, "None of this matters," you start to believe it. If the movie had been ten or 20 minutes long, you might be inclined to forgive its other failures, but it runs nearly 100 minutes (130 in Europe, I'm told). It wants to tickle your fancy and break your heart, but mostly it wears you out.
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