Yet instead of cutting some of the novel’s more absurd elements in order to focus on the romantic tragedy at its core, Gondry and co-writer/producer Luc Bossi have decided to take the writer’s words à la lettre, replicating his many literary flights-of-fancy and tossing in everything but the kitchen sink - although there’s one of those too…out of which pops a papier mâché eel (again, during the film’s opening sequence). Burroughs’ The Soft Machine into a sci-fi blockbuster, or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow into an HBO miniseries. Granted, transforming Vian’s experimental 1947 book into a comprehensible narrative is a little like trying to turn William S. With the help of Michel Gondry and Audrey Tautou, it is set to seduce many, many more.The experience is rather like watching a very long, very expensive (the film was budgeted at €18M, or $23M) episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse that’s been co-directed by Terry Gilliam and Salvador Dali, and Gondry pummels the viewer with a two-hour-plus visual assault that’s easier to admire than it is to enjoy.Ī wide local rollout by Studiocanal should see strong first-frame returns, but this surreal semi-period piece has little staying power, while overseas action will be concentrated in Francophone territories and art house markets where the Gondry label still means something. Recently voted number ten on Le Monde's list of the 100 Books of the Century (the top ten also included works by Camus, Proust, Kafka, Hemingway, and Steinbeck), Boris Vian's novel has been an icon of French literature for fifty years-the avant-garde, populist masterpiece by one of twentieth-century Paris's most intriguing cultural figures, a touchstone for generations of revolutionary young people, a jazz-fueled, science-fiction-infused, sexy, fantastical, nouveau-decadent tear-jerker that has charmed and beguiled hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. The story is simple: Boy meets girl boy marries girl girl falls ill on their honeymoon with a water lily on the lung, which can only be treated by being surrounded by flowers boy goes broke desperately trying to keep his true love alive.įirst published in 1947, Mood Indigo perfectly captures the feverishly creative, melancholy romance of mid-century Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

The basis of the new major movie from Michel Gondry, starring Audrey Tautou, the beloved French modern classic hailed as 'the most poignant love story of our time' by Raymond Queneau

Mood Indigo by Boris Vian