FILM | Reviews
FANTASY DRAMA MOOD INDIGO (12A) 125min ●●●●●
Adapted from a novel by French writer Boris Vian, Michel Gondry’s return to France after the bloated Hollywood excess of The Green Hornet is a bittersweet love story overburdened by directorial tricks.
Colin (Romain Duris) is a wealthy man who doesn’t have to work, preferring to inhabit his swish Parisian apartment and enjoying the meals cooked for him by chef Nicolas (The Intouchables’ Omar Sy). Venturing out to a party, Colin meets Chloe (Audrey Tautou), and they enjoy a whirlwind courtship and marriage. But Chloe’s health starts to deteriorate, and despite Colin’s willingness to help, his supply of cash is quickly running out.
Gondry’s visual flair worked well in pop videos and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but Mood Indigo is chaotic with unexplained ideas, from the transparent car Colin drives to the mechanical cloud that transports him and Chloe around Paris. When the mood becomes darker, subtle touches like the accumulation of cobwebs in Colin’s apartment are drowned out by silly inventions such as the insect-like doorbell. Taking its name from the classic Duke Ellington track, Mood
Indigo aspires to be a timeless classic of lost love, but the jokes are only occasionally funny, and Colin and Chloe never seem real – just figments of an over-active imagination. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 1 Aug.
ANIMATION THE CONGRESS (15) 122min ●●●●●
Robin Wright hasn’t had a good part in 15 years; her entire career has been blighted by poor choices, in relationships as well as in roles, and at this point in time it’d be better for her if she retired from showbiz entirely. This is the rather harsh starting point for Ari Folman’s The Congress, in which Wright (playing herself) is offered a way out: a studio will map Wright’s likeness into a computer and use it to make as many movies as they like, while she retires on a hefty severance package.
Occupying similar territory to Charlie Kaufman’s
Synecdoche, New York, The Congress asks profound questions about performance and identity. While it may occasionally lack Synecdoche’s fingertip grip on coherence, it more than makes up for it with visual fireworks. In a lengthy animated second act, future Wright attends a
summit on image-mapping technology, a fantastical world inspired in equal parts by Japanese anime, vintage Disney and the psychedelia of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. It’s a feast for the eyes that bewilders and entrances, and while the extreme visuals may serve only to distract from a somewhat muddled storyline, they’ll stay in your mind long after the credits have rolled. (Niki Boyle) ■ General release from Fri 15 Aug.
DRAMA BOYHOOD (15) 166min ●●●●●
Patience is the name of the game for writer and director Richard Linklater. Fresh from charting the romantic ups and down of Celine and Jessie over two decades in his Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy, he unveils another slowly gestated project that shows how willingness to play the long game can create a true cinematic original. Shot in instalments over a 12-year period, Boyhood is a fictional drama charting the
changes in the life of Mason (Ellar Coltrane). Raised by his mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette) while his largely absent father (Ethan Hawke) checks in and out of his life, Mason goes through childhood and puberty in Texas, captured in a series of lightly but accurately drawn scenarios, pinned down with pop culture references (Star Wars, Harry Potter) and political background (September 11, Iraq, Barack Obama). From backyard games to starting college and sexual awareness, Mason’s story is deliberately unexceptional and ducks any accusations of melodrama; it’s an authentically awkward, ordinary life, scrupulously observed. The 166-minute running time is the only real problem with Boyhood; Linklater seems to be too much in love with the material to throw anything out. Coltrane gives a wonderfully natural performance, rising to the standard set by Hawke and particularly Arquette, who makes the role of Olivia both frustrating and deeply sympathetic as she struggles to make a secure family unit for Mason and his sister Samantha, played by Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter.
Boyhood is another deeply personal film from Linklater, a director whose bigger films (School of Rock, Me and Orson Welles) remain true to his gift for natural dialogue and uncontrived set-ups. Boyhood is a deliberately minor pleasure, unsparing of the tougher lessons to be learned from parenthood, for child and adult alike. The punishing length aside, it’s a triumphant experimental film that offers a unique cinematic one-off. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 11 Jul.
DRAMA WELCOME TO NEW YORK (18) 125min ●●●●● The (dis)honourable traditions of the film á clef - true-life stories fictionalised for legal reasons in the fashion of Citizen Kane, The Greek Tycoon or Velvet Goldmine - are spottily maintained by Abel Ferrara’s drama Welcome to New York.
Gerald Depardieu brings his not-inconsiderable bulk to bear on the role of Devereaux, a financier with one eye on the French presidency, and the other on any woman who crosses his path. He comes spectacularly unstuck when he sexually assaults the maid who unwittingly disturbs his shower in a hotel room during a business trip to NYC. Few will miss the clear parallels to the much publicised court-case of IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who stood for a similar crime in 2011.
Ferrara sticks closely to the known facts of the Strauss-Khan case, although casually throwing in a second attempted rape by Devereaux makes the director’s agenda somewhat bald. Such embellishments sit uneasily with scenes of him being stripped and humiliated by prison guards. Such balance seems redundant in a film that says little of consequence beyond fictionalising its target; only the presence of Jacqueline Bisset as Devereaux’s wife hits an appropriately hysterical note for this tabloid-trashy film which quickly chokes on its pretensions. (Eddie Harrison) ■ Selected release from Fri 8 Aug.
74 THE LIST 10 Jul–21 Aug 2014