‘The Book of Solutions’ Review: When Did the Talented Michel Gondry Become the World’s Most Annoying Filmmaker? – Variety
If you happen to’ve ever questioned when it was that Michel Gondry, the gifted French director of “Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts,” grew to become the world’s most annoying filmmaker, you may say the reply is, “He at all times was.” But nobody, together with me, fairly thinks of him that manner. That’s as a result of the few works of his which have come to prominence possess a particular mixture of facility and allure. I like “Everlasting Sunshine,” a virtuoso film that bends your mind and breaks your coronary heart on the identical time. You may merely select to characterize it because the masterpiece of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, however the reality is that Gondry directed it — the leaps in time, the emotionally convulsive performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet — with a masterful sense of play and gravitational management.
I’ve at all times heard that the script Kaufman initially turned in was twice as sophisticated, and that it was Gondry who had the knowledge to work with him to prune it down. In 2004, when “Everlasting Sunshine” was launched, it was solely Gondry’s second function as a director, and it felt, from there, like he might do something. What he did, as an alternative, was to implode right into a confetti burst of featherweight absurdist quirk.
“The E-book of Options,” which premiered final month on the Cannes Movie Pageant, is Gondry’s first function in eight years, and it’s presumably the worst film he has ever made. But like his different duds, it’s marked by a form of airtight mischievous self-love. Gondry has by no means misplaced his craft as a filmmaker (that is the director who, again in his music-video and TV-commercial days, invented bullet-time three years earlier than “The Matrix”), and “The E-book of Options” spins out its story with the identical flaky droll Teflon confidence that has marked such top-heavy-with-their-own-caprice Gondry comedies because the befuddled video-store reverie “Be Form Rewind” (2008), the surrealist romantic tragedy “Temper Indigo” (2013), the two-kids-on-a-road-trip-across-France drama “Microbe and Gasoline” (2015), or the movie that marked the flameout of his American studio profession, his actually horrible 2011 reimagining of “The Inexperienced Hornet” (bear in mind? Seth Rogan performed the Inexperienced Hornet, which turned out to be an enormous “nope”).
As a result of “Everlasting Sunshine” is such an incredible and justly well-known film, and since Gondry was a real wizard of music video (which is why he labored with everybody from Björk to the White Stripes to Lenny Kravitz to Belinda Carlisle to Donald Fagen to Sinéad O’Connor to Malcolm McLaren to the Rolling Stones to Daft Punk to Sheryl Crowe to Radiohead), these achievements have overshadowed what seems to be the important Gondry aesthetic. The remainder of his films are crockpot casseroles of flaked-out whimsy, retro nostalgia, and extra flaked-out whimsy. They have an inclination to function dreamers who’re additionally losers, technological contraptions which have a rickety DIY high quality, all of it slathered in…extra whimsy.
What locations “The E-book of Options” in its personal particular class of Gondry dud is that the film is about a movie director, one who’s making a film that appears so fuzzy and treasured that it’s as if the movie we’re watching had been attempting to raise the Gondry whimsy to a brand new stage of meta-annoyance. Within the opening scene, the director, Marc (Pierre Niney), a bearded 30ish legend in his personal thoughts, meets with the executives on the impartial studio that’s funding his newest mission. The movie he’s making is 4 hours and seven minutes lengthy, however he already is aware of it’s a masterpiece. He assaults everybody there along with his obnoxious concepts for it, to the purpose that when the studio go well with in cost shoots him down, we are able to’t assist however aspect with the go well with. Marc, shattered by the response, goes out to have a cigarette — besides he doesn’t smoke. He’s actually hustling all the way down to the enhancing suite in order that he can steal the movie, together with the enhancing gear, and cease the studio from ruining his “imaginative and prescient.”
Gondry shoots all of this with an acerbic satirical contact that appears, for some time, to depart the film open to the chance that it may be mocking its hero. Besides that Gondry by no means actually sticks with anybody else’s point-of-view; he likes Marc an excessive amount of to skewer him. Marc and his editor, Charlotte (Blanche Gardin), head for the village of Cevannes, the place they gap up within the nation home of Marc’s Aunt Denise (Françoise Lebrun). There, Marc plans to finish the movie on his personal grandiose phrases.
A film concerning the making a film could be an irresistible style, however that’s probably not what “The E-book of Options” is. Gondry locations Marc, in all his impish self-regard, entrance and middle, in order that we get to spend an inordinate period of time ingesting in how a lot he looks as if the facile Zoomer descendent of Jean-Pierre Léaud — an actor we consider as an enormous (and is), although Léaud, within the Seventies, performed greater than his share of obnoxious disaffected narcissistic brats. Pierre Niney, the French-Belgian actor who’s finest identified for portraying Yves Saint Laurent within the 2014 French biopic of the identical title (it received him the César for finest actor), takes off from there. As Marc, he’s just like the Léaud of “Day for Evening” downgraded to a doofus irritant, with skinny curled lips and almond eyes that soak up every part however react to nothing. All that exists for Marc is what’s in his personal noggin.
The character, as offered, is a liar, an abuser, and a flyweight sociopathic pest. We hear, in voiceover, his judgments of different individuals, which are usually megalomaniacal dismissals. Everybody is stuffed with it apart from him. Different characters swing in for a second or two, just like the native who lets Marc borrow his recording studio, the slacker mayor, or the assistant editor who coughs compulsively. Gondry, as at all times, is into doohickeys, contraptions, and discovering low-tech methods to do high-tech issues. Marc retains writing down his Zen-clever-idiotic concepts (“keep in second gear”), compiling them into one thing he calls The E-book of Options. As quickly as we hear the title of Sting talked about, we all know, as certainly because the regulation of Chekhov’s Gun, that Sting shall be popping in for a cameo.
How trifling, how tedious, is “The E-book of Options”? Let me put it this fashion: On the exhibiting of the movie I attended in Cannes, the lady subsequent to me was taking a look at stuff on her cellphone…and nobody round her bothered to complain! After some time, your principal response to Marc’s faux-adorable imperviousness could also be that you just need to slap his gawky, staring-bird face. But he’s no extra deluded, in his manner, than Michel Gondry, a maverick of expertise who can in some way persuade himself that we’re going to discover a character — or a film — like this one irresistible. He must rejoin the true world and cease basking in his personal everlasting sunshine.
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