![]() ![]() They tend to feature dreamers who are also losers, technological contraptions that have a rickety DIY quality, all of it slathered in…more whimsy. The rest of his movies are crockpot casseroles of flaked-out whimsy, retro nostalgia, and more flaked-out whimsy. Gondry has never lost his craft as a filmmaker (this is the director who, back in his music-video and TV-commercial days, invented bullet-time three years before “The Matrix”), and “The Book of Solutions” spins out its story with the same flaky droll Teflon confidence that has marked such top-heavy-with-their-own-caprice Gondry comedies as the befuddled video-store reverie “Be Kind Rewind” (2008), the surrealist romantic tragedy “Mood Indigo” (2013), the two-kids-on-a-road-trip-across-France drama “Microbe and Gasoline” (2015), or the film that marked the flameout of his American studio career, his truly terrible 2011 reimagining of “The Green Hornet” (remember? Seth Rogan played the Green Hornet, which turned out to be a big “nope”).īecause “Eternal Sunshine” is such a great and justly famous movie, and because Gondry was a true wizard of music video (which is why he worked with everyone 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), those achievements have overshadowed what turns out to be the essential Gondry aesthetic. Yet like his other duds, it’s marked by a kind of hermetic mischievous self-love. “ The Book of Solutions,” which premiered last month at the Cannes Film Festival, is Gondry’s first feature in eight years, and it’s possibly the worst movie he has ever made. What he did, instead, was to implode into a confetti burst of featherweight absurdist quirk. In 2004, when “Eternal Sunshine” was released, it was only Gondry’s second feature as a director, and it felt, from there, like he could do anything. I’ve always heard that the script Kaufman originally turned in was twice as complicated, and that it was Gondry who had the wisdom to work with him to prune it down. ![]()
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