Review: Mood Indigo

City Paper grade: C+

By the time Michel Gondry’s director credit appears at the beginning of Mood Indigo, viewers may already feel like they’ve binge-watched a season’s worth of Pee-wee’s Playhouse while listening to every track on a Duke Ellington box set. The whimsy is unrelenting in Gondry’s adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume des jours, and while the director’s prodigious visual imagination can lead to some delightful surprises, the accumulation here is akin to a cocaine-force sugar rush. There’s less plot than in your average fairy tale: Independently wealthy Colin (Romain Duris) meets and instantly falls in love with Chloé (Audrey Tatou), but their gleeful romance is interrupted when she falls ill. Gondry crams the empty spaces around that meager story with inventive confections, blending the retro-futurism of Brazil with the gamine preciousness of Amélie, mixed with equal parts Rube Goldberg and Tex Avery and handcrafted with an Etsy sensibility. The couple is surrounded by a gaggle of eccentrics — Colin’s stylish manservant (Omar Sy), a friend obsessed with a burlesqued-Sartre philosopher (Gad Elmaleh), even a mouse played by a man in a mouse suit — and in their presence there’s no such thing as an inanimate object. The crush of madcap trifles becomes so overwhelming that its residue masks the tonal shift when Chloé’s disease begins to blanch the film of color and life, accompanying the final moments with a sigh of exhausted relief rather than a moan of grief.