The Great Gatsby – Baz Luhrmann

The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann – USA) 140 minutes

Baz Luhrmann adapts Fitzgerald and the result is pretty much as you might expect. There are no surprises here. You have a continual sense that you have seen this film before. That is largely because you have – if, that is, you happened to chance upon any of Luhrmann’s previous four features. Luhrmann goes for the same notes all the time, he modulates them less than a Wahhabi muezzin delivering an unwavering call to prayer. The film is all singing, all dancing, all loud, all of the time. But, you expect that, don’t you?

Luhrmann tackles the jazz age by ignoring jazz entirely in favour of executive producer Jay-Z’s sub-woofed party fuzz; but there's nothing necessarily wrong with that – the anachronistic music is one of the least jarring things about the film. His approach to the roaring twenties is to make the film roar, and boy, does it roar. Like a haemmorrhoidal lion. With sunburn. The film is a yabbering orgy of more-ishness; no sound is too much, no colour too garish, no cut too abrupt to let us know this was one swell era that just doesn’t come across in the rigidly analogue format that was a novel published in 1925.

Underneath all the slobbery excess and the over-designed munificence are the characters, who are considerably thinner than in Fitzgerald’s original, despite mouthing identical dialogue. This is largely down to poor casting and bad acting: Tobey Maguire, God bless him, is fit only for afternoon TV with his permanent look of fortunate surprise (no amount of radioactive spider bites will ever bestow a screen presence on Tobey). Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway is a cipher but he is not that empty. Carey Mulligan has never convinced me much before and she struggles badly as Daisy, she is playing an actor playing someone dressed up to resemble Daisy Buchanan. Leonardo di Caprio is, on the face of it, well cast as Gatsby, but he chews the 3D scenery up something awful. The ensemble acting is poor but you can hardly blame the actors involved; it doesn’t look like they were getting any direction worth talking about, not least from a man whose mise en scène is all over the place (and the 3D only makes it look worse).

The film captures the essence of the era, but not much of the flavour. It is also a bit annoying to see Nick’s narrative being couched in such an overt way as part of his later therapy sessions; what’s wrong with old-fashioned voiceover? Luhrmann’s Gatsby is a whirlwind of ineptitude from start to finish, and is surprisingly uninvolving. That said, it is not a travesty. If anything, it is too faithful to the book, or at least the period background to the book. It tries, as is common with any new contemporary version of a canonical novel, to show how different it is from all that have come before – it may even know the original novel better than Fitzgerald did himself. It probably would not have been a better film had it aimed a little less at the cultural history surrounding the novel, but a greater attention to the poor tenants of Fitzgerald’s novel would have at least made it slightly more watchable.

As bad as Luhrmann’s film is, it is admirable in many respects. It is like the uncouth distant cousins that show you up at weddings, all loud mouths, shirts the colour of a pack of Opal Fruits, propping up the bar. But they are still cousins and you cut them a bit of slack. Similarly, The Great Gatsby and its cheerful, blasé vulgarity is preferable to much of what passes for literary adaptations these days. Slavoj Zizek admires Ayn Rand because she betrays more readily the disingenuousness of mainstream of capitalism, rather than the more disciplined, streamlined advocates of real predatory capitalism. In the same way, Luhrmann’s film shows up all the better the predatory pedantry of literary adaptions. It even clocks in at two hours twenty minutes, twenty shorter than Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, which looked right but had all the memorability of a wedding you have been invited to at the last minute.

My heart sinks when I learn of a book I like being adapted for the cinema, not because, as per the usual gripe,  the film will ruin it (any great novel’s reputation is strong enough to long outlive the three to four weeks of PR inanity that surrounds the release of a film). No, the reason my heart sinks is because there are people out there who cannot read a novel without imagining how it would look projected on a screen, its costumes, its sets, its characters painstakingly reproduced. If that is what you’re thinking of when reading a novel, you’re missing the point. It’s a little like drinking a beer and wondering what it would taste like, frozen, as an ice lolly. Sure you can do it but why bother? A novel’s inner life and its outer structure are made of words, which is a sand-like substance, notoriously difficult to replicate on screen, but still the most interesting thing about the novel.

That’s not to say that novels (or plays, or even poems) should never serve as source material for films – there have been many fine films adapted from books, and there continue to be so. It is, however, depressing that we must be visited, every fifteen years or so now at this rate, with a new Dickens, Brontë, Jane Austen or Tolstoy adaptation, when few of those in the past have been terribly memorable anyway. Some filmmakers do get it right – Andrea Arnold’s recent Wuthering Heights understood the brute social relations that underlie the intense romance of the novel. Most adaptors of literary classics though are content to wallow in the crinoline, the fine teak wainscoting and the Received Pronunciation (American actors in particular are wont to apply RP to any character, of any nationality, from before the 20th century). That is why most film adaptations of classics bring little to the table and are instantly disposable, like the covers in a fast-food restaurant.

It is not only classics that are subject to this either; the film rights on practically every contemporary novel that makes a splash are instantly snapped up. It’s not too surprising – it is a relatively easy way for studios to make money, provided the production is not delayed for too long, and few writers can afford to say no. A strong contemporary novel will likewise survive the brief ignominy of being associated with an idiotic film adaptation, and will only gain in reputation from a good film treatment. But this industrial reproduction of hit novels rarely leads to good cinema – one need only look at the work of Stephen Daldry, who, it seems, cannot behold a Waterstone’s 3-for-2 table without thinking of getting into the cinematic pants of every book on it. This is why we should welcome more adaptations like Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, no matter how vulgar, how misplaced, how tin-eared they might be. Such violence done to the po-faced edifice of ‘literary’ cinema might sensitise people to the pedantry of the slavish adaptation and might lead people to enjoy the source text without wasting time ruminating over whether Keira Knightly or Carey Mulligan might make a better Maggie Tulliver.

Mud – Jeff Nichols

Mud (Jeff Nichols – USA) 130 minutes

The first thing that is puzzling about Mud is why it took twelve months to get a release after it screened at Cannes, particularly when Jeff Nichols’ previous film, Take Shelter was such a popular and critical success. Mud is in many respects more commercial than that film, with an arguably bigger-name cast (Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, as well as Nichols regular Michael Shannon); it is also a more conventional film, if one that is certainly a cut above most current Hollywood output.

The film starts off with two young friends Ellis and Neckbone (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland) who secretly head out to a small island on the Mississippi in search of a boat they have heard is stuck in a tree. They soon discover there is someone living in it – a drifter who goes by the name of Mud (McConaughey); on the run from the law, he makes a deal with the youngsters, promising them the boat if they come back with food. The more practical Neckbone is initially wary of this Magwitch character but Ellis is more drawn to him, being an idealist who recognises something of himself in the older man. It soon becomes clear however that Mud is wanted for murder and as well as hiding from the law, he has to elude bounty hunters hired by his victim’s family. The two boys, both of them from impoverished fishing families, become embroiled in a drama that gets only messier as Mud tries to persuade his old flame Juniper (Witherspoon) to run away with him.

As in his two previous films, Nichols delivers a full and truthful  portrait of life in small town America, in this case DeWitt, Arkansas. The youngsters, like their elders, have a resourcefulness born of poverty – they are adept bricoleurs, able to turn their hand to almost any type of manual exigency; they are already conscious of the fact that they cannot expect to rely on anything in life, what with their family’s livelihoods under threat from an increasingly officious river authority. The film presents a dense matrix of father figures, both absent and present and their confused offspring – Ellis has a strained relationship with his own father, Senior (Ray McKinnon), while Neckbone is an orphan, raised by his uncle Galen (Shannon) much as Mud was himself raised by Tom Blankenship (Shepard). It’s a laudable trope but one that is a bit overdone, not to mention over-populated; we get the point early on and the film lurches into cliche from time to time. Nichols’ men are fabulists, self-deluded and fatuous, who are far less rooted than their various long-suffering women, whom they nonetheless harbour bitterness towards.

The final act is another puzzling aspect of the film – it seems grafted on from another movie entirely. The denouement is both cluttered and contrived and it doesn’t help that the gang of killers on Mud’s trail are little more than cardboard cut-outs. I also felt that, having set up as ineffably a romantic rogue as Mud, who is like a Christy Mahon of the Mississippi, Nichols squandered an opportunity to give us a far more resonant, ambiguous ending, as he did in Take Shelter. It is no disgrace that Mud is a comedown after that film, which was, after all, probably the best American film of the past few years, but it could have still been better. A little more ambition and a touch more audacity might have raised it above the level of merely efficient.

The Past – Asghar Farhadi

The Past (Le passé) (Asghar Farhadi – France/Italy) 130 minutes

Having swept practically every award going, including the Best Foreign Film Oscar and the Golden Bear at Berlin, for A Separation, Asghar Farhadi makes his first film outside of Iran. The French-produced The Past gives Farhadi a fresh environment to work in, but it is very much in the vein of all his films to date.

Another separation takes place in this film – Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), a forty-something Iranian returns to Paris after four years back in Tehran to finalise his divorce from his French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo). The divorce is an amicable one and is by far the least complicated thing in the film – it is quickly resolved in a brief scene, where the judge is a far less imposing presence than in A Separation, and Farhadi eschews the claustrophobic subjective camera that ratcheted up the tension of that film from the very beginning. The Past is a more slow-burning film and nothing much happens for the first hour, even though it is clear there are recriminations and painful secrets that are set to rise to the surface at some point later on.

The first hitch is Marie is now living with a new boyfriend, Samir (Tahar Rahim) and his son Fouad, and has not warned Ahmad in advance. But the conflict comes not there, as you might expect, but with Marie’s teenage daughter (from a relationship prior to Ahmad) Lucie (Pauline Burlet), who is absenting herself from the home with greater frequency and who is steadfastly set against her mother’s relationship with Samir. The latter’s wife is also in a coma, after an attempted suicide, seemingly after finding out about his affair with Marie. But this is still only the beginning of it, with the motives and resentments of all only being gradually divulged as the film progresses. The past of the title is also not quite as distant as its imposing bareness suggests.

The Past is an exquisitely crafted drama and Farhadi glides effortlessly into a filmmaking environment very different to the one he is used to. The performances are also excellent, particularly Rahim, who, even though it is only four years since he was revealed in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, already looks like a seasoned professional, he is an actor of a rare intelligence and maturity for someone so young. Bejo, more accustomed to comedy, also repays handsomely the surprising choice to cast her instead of Marion Cotillard, who dropped out. Mosaffa is world-weary but generous as the Persian voice of reason, who may not be quite as reasonable as he thinks. His character does however seem to be a bit underwritten – there is little real sense of the sort of relationship Ahmad and Marie had and you get the sense that he is there to function as part-catalyst, part-diegetic father confessor.

For all the film’s qualities, it lacks the internal dynamics of Farhadi’s Iranian work – the logistical and moral imperatives forced on his characters. A feature of his earlier films, Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly as much as A Separation is characters seeking to carve out autonomous spaces for themselves free from the interference of a hostile, prescriptive state. We see this in the hiring of the maid on the black in A Separation and the later efforts to buy her off when things go wrong; it is also implicit in the attempt by the holiday-makers in About Elly to resolve the disappearance of Elly, a girl they barely know, without getting the police involved. One character in The Past is similarly concerned by her relationship with authority – Naïma (Sabrina Ouazani), the young Maghrebine who works in Samir’s dry cleaners as an illegal immigrant. This provides the spur for one vital plot turn but the rest of the characters have more workaday causes of grief. The Past is not a lesser film for this but its drama is implicitly less intense – and less draining – than Farhadi’s films in his home country.

The Past has been very favourably received by critics at Cannes and it is likely to garner an award or two from Steven Spielberg’s jury, most likely for the acting or the screenplay. Farhadi intends to continue living and working in Iran, but in light of the trouble the authorities, piqued by his rapturous welcome in Hollywood, have given him, the option to make more films abroad is one to keep open. And, if The Past is anything to go by, he shouldn’t have any problem doing that.

"THE PAST" by Asghar Farhadi - TRAILER from Memento Films International on Vimeo.

Promised Land – Gus Van Sant

Promised Land (Gus Van Sant – USA/United Arab Emirates) 106 minutes

For a good director, Gus Van Sant has made quite a few bad films in his time; nonetheless, all his films, from the resolutely commercial (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) to the experimental (Gerry, his frame-by-frame Psycho remake), both bad and good, are recognisably his. Each one bears the indelible stamp of a Gus Van Sant film. Van Sant’s last, the teenage cancer drama Restless, a tiresome stew of sentimentalism and quirkiness, brought to an end a run of excellent films but he was always likely to bounce back before too long.

Promised Land sees him return to the political activist genre that he first touched on in Milk, though this time the setting – rural Pennsylvania – is not so obvious for one of his films. It also reunites him with Matt Damon, who wrote and acted in the two films that represent the extremes of Van Sant’s work, Good Will Hunting and Gerry. Damon also contributes the screenplay here (based on an idea by Dave Eggers) and produces along with John Krasinski (who also stars, as the environmentalist activist Dustin Noble). The resulting film is a surprisingly robust if flawed drama about moral scruples and the strains of professional life.

Damon is Steve Butler, a young salesman for energy giant Global, who is a dab hand at convincing struggling farming communities to sell up their land for oil exploration (using the now notorious hydraulic fracturing method). When about to be promoted to an executive position at the beginning of the film, he explains his secret as being able to empathise with his prey, coming as he does from a similar rural background. Arriving in a small town with his sales partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDorman) however, he comes up against unexpected resistance, in the form of a science teacher and retired aviation engineer played by Hal Holbrook. Holbrook is then approached by Dustin Noble, an unknown environmental activist who is every bit Butler’s match, using fair means and foul to turn the townspeople against the buy-out bid.

The film is quite good early on in setting up the debate on fracking, and Butler is an impressively delineated figure of moral ambiguity. Krasinski is a rather alarmingly friendly idealist who resists corruption by his corporate adversaries while not being above delivering a few underhanded blows himself. The problem is the film does not really convince in the depiction of the community turning against the fracking. Their reaction is far too pavlovian and the implication is the townspeople are far too dim-witted to be capable of making an informed decision on their own. Butler’s efforts to win them over with a cattle fair is also a little crude and it betrays Damon and Krasinski’s origins as city boys. Even the roughest yokel is more sophisticated than that.

Ultimately Promised Land (a nifty title which infers something very different from its Biblical connotation) is a political sports movie like Milk but there is no clear-cut victory for anyone (the film, unlike many of this sort, is not based on any particular real-life case). Damon, a limited but efficient actor, is good in a role in which we find an echo of his younger Will Hunting (McDormand’s Sue is similarly cut from the same cloth as her Marge Gunderson in Fargo). Not surprisingly, Promised Land has been the target of public relations campaigns on behalf of fracking companies. I wonder if anyone pointed out the dubiousness of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates providing financial backing for the film, something that gives the film a strange additional flavour?

The Lebanese Rocket Society – Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige

The Lebanese Rocket Society (Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige – Lebanon/France/Qatar) 90 minutes

In the 1960s, as the space race was heating up between the global superpowers, a small recently established Armenian university in Beirut was conducting its own rocket program of sorts. The program was headed by Manoug Manougian, a young professor of mathematics at Haigazian University, and it launched ten solid-fuel Cedar rockets over the course of seven years. The program had no avowed political intentions – something inconceivable today – but political leaders from across the Arab world – Nasser in particular – did try to get in on the action, albeit without success.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s third feature traces the history of the program, tracking down the protagonists – Manougian is now a professor in Florida while the university’s president at the time John Markarian is living in retirement in Pennsylvania. The film begins with some coy humour – the directors’ rudimentary Google research throws up nothing but Hezbollah Katyushas as representing ‘Lebanese rockets’. A trip to Haigazian University is more fruitful, though the archive news reports are all in Armenian and they have to get a student to translate. This front-ending of the research difficulties is a bit unconvincing as, even if Manougian’s rocket program has been largely forgotten, it is not all that obscure. There are ample witnesses to it, particularly Harry Koundakjian, the father of Lebanese photojournalism, who documented several of the launches. There is also Youssef Wehbé, a former army officer charged with observing it, who says that the government’s interest in the project was ultimately of a military nature.

The idealism of Manougian and his students was eventually quashed when the Lebanese government, under international pressure, put a stop to the project in the late 1960s. The researchers themselves had also exceeded their own expectations, to the extent that they almost got themselves into trouble, when one rocket made it all the way to Cyprus. It landed in the sea but there was an international complaint from the British government, who had (and still have) a military base on the island. What might have been is imagined in a futuristic animated sequence of Lebanese space travel at the end of the film.

The Lebanese Rocket Society is a conventional enough documentary and lacks the spark of Hadjithomas and Joreige’s earlier films Perfect Day and Je veux voir, both of which straddled fiction and documentary. As in those films however, the civil war looms large; in a way, the real focus of the film is not the rocket program per se but the society that was lost to the 15-year conflict. In many respects, Lebanon has weathered the last forty years surprisingly well – despite the bloody conflict, the rise of terrorism, occupation by both Israel and Syria and sectarian tension which keeps the country forever teetering on the brink of collapse, the country is still there. There has been none of the wholesale ethnic cleansing and population movements that have seen countries elsewhere in the world emptied of ethnic groups throughout the 19th century. Even Lebanon’s Christian community is faring much better than many others in the Middle East.

That instability has its own impact on the filmmakers. As part of a range of art installations to accompany the film, they decided to rebuild one of the rockets and give it as a gift to Haigazian University. Of course, they have to persuade authorities they have no military intent. They garner the requisite permits only to have to start all over again when Saad Hariri’s government falls in January 2011. It is this sense of portraying a historical flux that the film itself inhabits that gives The Lebanese Rocket Society an unexpected edge. This film may be a much lighter one than its predecessors but Hadjithomas and Joreige continue to have a lot to say about a small country with a painful but fascinating history.

Hannah Arendt – Margarethe von Trotta

Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta – Germany/Luxembourg/France/Israel) 113 minutes

Margarethe von Trotta’s latest portrayal of female German historical figures features the political theorist Hannah Arendt, or more precisely, the few months in 1961 surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, about which Arendt wrote her famous articles for the New Yorker (subsequently published as Eichmann in Jerusalem). Barbara Sukowa, a regular in von Trotta’s films, in which she has already played Rosa Luxemburg, Hildegard von Bingen and a fictionalised Gudrun Esslin, is Arendt, a role you suspect she has been waiting her whole life to fill. Other figures in the film include Arendt’s husband, the Marxist Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), her friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) and New Yorker editor William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson). It is very much a talky affair, with the capture and trial of Eichmann discussed at length by Arendt’s largely German emigré circle, a colloquy that becomes more fractious after Arendt shocks the Jewish community with the publication of her first article.

The film is particularly strong on the development of Arendt’s famous concept of the banality of evil, which it suggests came to her as she sat watching the live relay of the trial in the Jerusalem press room. We see the actual archive footage of Eichmann in the dock, in which he berates the prosecution for their inaccuracies and selective interpretation of the bureaucratic evidence that he is only too familiar with. What causes the shit-storm back in New York though is her assertion that the number of Jewish deaths might have been less had there not been a Jewish leadership to co-operate with the Nazis. Viewed today, it is not an incredibly contentious argument but it inflamed Jewish opinion in both New York and Israel (where some of those leaders, such as Rudolf Kastner, assassinated in 1957, had taken refuge). Arendt received hate mail, was reviled as a self-hating Jew, many of her friends turned against her, Mossad turned up on her doorstep to issue veiled threats, and she was subject to academic intimidation, of the sort US critics of Israel today would recognise.

Arendt, despite the personal hurt caused her by her friends’ desertion, was unwavering – knowing most of her critics to be as intellectually mediocre as she found Eichmann to be – and Sukowa captures very well the imperious, at times overly-dispassionate, side to her character. Unfortunately she hams it up a little in the more dramatic scenes, particularly her defence in front of her students at the New School – while the intention is to convey impassioned argumentation, it reminds you a little too much of Lili von Stupp in Blazing Saddles. The film also protrays in flashback her romantic relationship with Martin Heidegger, her one-time teacher and mentor. While it makes perfect sense to evoke what would have been an undoubtedly seismic effect on Arendt's life – particularly given Heidegger's later collaboration with the Nazis – seeing the author of Being and Time playing hanky-panky with Hannah Arendt moves the film into the realm of the risible. Von Trotta’s direction is also overly academic – the film resembles a TV movie, or mini-series even, which is not surprising as her career in recent years has alternated between projects for TV and the big screen. Still, that hasn’t hampered its fortunes in Germany, where it has been a big hit at the box office. While the film may have the commendable effect of making Arendt known to a general audience, it really is a work that is far from approaching the stature of its subject, despite the best efforts of all involved.

Mood Indigo – Michel Gondry

Mood Indigo (L’écume des jours) (Michel Gondry – France/Belgium) 125 minutes

I wrote a few weeks ago about how my neighbourhood is becoming increasingly popular with filmmakers (mostly French, though it did also appear in Brian de Palma’s Femme Fatale over a decade ago). Now it is featuring in what is likely to be the biggest French film of the year; last Spring, a number of fantastical customised cars appeared on the streets around where I live, with the announcement that filming was afoot for Michel Gondry’s adaptation of Boris Vian’s 1947 novel L’écume des jours (translated, though little known, in English as Froth on the Daydream). The film has now made it to the screen. The result – a third adaptation of the novel – is a mixed bag, visually resplendent and inventive but ultimately rather empty. That said, it is definitely worth a look.

Vian’s novel is a French counterpart to On the Road or Catcher in the Rye, a mid-century novel that has been devoured by generations of teenagers. It is also, crucially, very different in nature and mood from Kerouac or Salinger’s novels. It tells of the wasting away of Chloé, the wife of the main character, Colin, after she ingests a water lily in her lungs while on their honeymoon. The novel is shot through with the existentialism of the day, even having as a peripheral character, a celebrated philosopher Jean-Sol Partre (the real Sartre would see the funny side and was an early champion of the novel, published when Vian was only 27). Jazz is also a key motif – Vian was a talented trumpeter, and close friend of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and many of the other greats of the era – and L’écume des jours is the literary embodiment of the zazou, a type of French student beatnik that surfaced during the German Occupation and which now lives on only in the Monaco, a sickly-sweet grenadine shandy confection popular among French students.

Gondry, not surprisingly, emphasises the fantastical aspect of the novel and picks and chooses for the film’s visual and aural texture. The soundtrack is the very jazz that Vian would have listened to (and played) while the costumes and sets are very much of the 1940s, though it is clearly set in some type of parallel universe of present-day Paris. Every frame of the film is filled with some type of disjointed surreal gadget or scenario – a TV chef instructing Colin’s manservant Nicolas (Omar Sy) as he cooks, a doorbell that crawls all over the apartment as it rings, a pair of two-tone loafers that growl and have a life of their own. My own favourite trope was the assembly-line typing pool located in the belly of Oscar Niemeyer's French Communist Party HQ. You imagine early on that it will all soon wear thin, but the visuals are actually the most enduring thing about the film. They are constantly inventive and have a gauche charm; they are a box of analogue delights found in the attic, an old hokey train-set resurrected by CGI.

Romain Duris, a man who doesn’t look to be getting any older, is well cast as Colin, even if he has very little in the way of a real character to grapple with. Audrey Tatou does the bare minimum as Chloé – neither good nor bad, she is rather a presence in a film, reassuring for audiences and financiers alike (in much the same way as Tom Hanks is in Hollywood). Better are Aïssa Maïga and Gad Elmaleh as Alice and Chick, the couple whose own travails pad out the subplot. Gondry himself also turns in a surprisingly effective comic performance as Chloé’s doctor.

While the film’s visual inventiveness never wanes, the narrative does. At just over two hours, it is about half an hour too long; what starts off like a sprightly, technicolor Guy Maddin film ends up like an actual Guy Maddin film. The final half-hour is a real slog and whereas Gondry ably captures the style and mood of Vian’s novel (as referenced in the film’s English-language title), his repackaging of its ideas and themes leaves a lot more to be desired. In a way, you can trace the film’s problems, like many of Gondry’s recent films, to the lack of a Charlie Kaufman, who wrote his first two, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Kaufman doubles up, folds and contorts plot, time and space in his scripts in much the same way Gondry mangles visual information – in the two early films, they complemented each other well. Without Kaufman though, Gondry is really back to where he started out as – a talented director of music videos with a flair for the imaginative but lacking the structural discipline necessary for a full feature (though you might also say that Kaufman without Gondry or Spike Jonze is himself adrift – his Synecdoche, New York, plays out in an equally plodding way to this film). Mood Indigo is ultimately a thin undertaking that fails to really do justice to the source text. Still, the film is visually exciting enough to recommend, and it is likely to do well internationally, even if its posterior success is set to be as motion-picture wallpaper projected on the walls of hipster bars and clubs.