- From Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo: “If we win the race, we become the heroes of the story!”
In a post last week I considered the possible influence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher on a key sequence of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. I failed to acknowledge, though, how this sequence is also highly characteristic of Linklater. To review, the passage finds a junior high-aged Mason walking and talking with a callous, go-getting female classmate who seems to be romantically interested in him. The scene plays out in a single take that’s one of the longest in this 165-minute film; the overt formal ambition (compared with the “invisible” style of most of the other scenes) would seem to hint at some deeper thematic significance, despite the fact that the female classmate will never appear again in Boyhood. Of course, the audience doesn’t know that as the scene is happening—and Linklater, as usual, deters viewers from anticipating what will happen next so they might better savor the ever-fleeting present moment.
One finds a similar lesson in the year’s other major Sartre-influenced film, Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo. Before the film’s central couple (Romain Duris and Audrey Tatou) get married in a church, they race their best friends (another couple played by Gad Elmaleh and Aissa Maiga) to the altar in Soap Box Derby cars that appear to move on their own. This development, like many others in the film, reflects the free-form logic of dreams. Once the race begins, it feels as though anything could happen, as the characters themselves are quick to observe. “If we win the race, we can get married and become the heroes of the story!” exclaims Elmaleh’s existentialist jazz cat Chick. For a brief moment, Gondry suggests that this may in fact occur—and that, rather than providing an escape from real life, dreams may be the best representation of its exhilarating, terrifying randomness.
