- Romain Duris and Audrey Tatou in Mood Indigo
The most direct precedent for Gondry’s film might be David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, which responds with comparable imagination to the challenge of adapting an unfilmable novel. Both are highly personal works that filter the author’s biography and literary style through the director’s unique aesthetic. Mood Indigo is as much about Vian’s Parisian adventures of the 1930s as it is about Gondry’s nostalgia for a time and place that he didn’t experience directly. The film ostensibly takes place in the present, yet it’s a present constantly in danger of being engulfed by the past—the Duke Ellington songs on the soundtrack, the outmoded technology, and even the factory where Chick works evoke the 30s. (It’s worth noting that Vian was Ellington’s French liaison when the latter came to Paris in 1939.) Yet Gondry’s postmodern sensibility defamiliarizes these elements and reminds us of our distance from them. One of the biggest hurdles separating the present from 1930s France is, of course, the Second World War, which rendered most prewar European culture either foreboding or naive. The piles of corpses that litter the 131-minute cut of Mood Indigo might be described as a literal illustration of that hurdle.
