IFFBoston: “Mood Indigo” is Visually Inventive But Lacks Emotional Depth

George Huertas ‘16 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Michel Gondry has had a career as colorful as his films. With such beautiful works as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, it was a given that anything he made would bear a stamp of ingenuity. That is, until he made The Green Hornet with Seth Rogen.
While certainly not a bad film, The Green Hornet suffered from a feeling of being too workmanlike. With all the supposed production troubles behind it, most were at least anticipating a hot mess. What the final product was didn’t even amount to that. It was simply… bland.
Gondry wouldn’t make another film for three years, which has now been marked by his return with the film Mood Indigo.

While the film certainly bears the marks of visual inventiveness typically seen of Gondry in such films as The Science of Sleep or Eternal Sunshine, it also lacks the emotional connection that those previous films made. Instead, while Mood Indigo certainly looks pretty, it also fails to give us a reason to feel something beneath the visuals.
Starring Romain Duris as Colin and Audrey Tautou as Chloe, Mood Indigo, at its most basic, tells the story of how these two fall in love, and how Chloe, during their honeymoon, falls ill. Due to her increasing sickliness (represented, in typically offbeat Gondry fashion, by a flower growing in her lungs), we see the color beginning to seep out of hers and Colin’s respective worlds.
It’s all very, very beautiful, and Gondry certainly knows how to craft his worlds. However, there is very little for the audience to connect with. Tautou and Duris’ performances are serviceable enough, but there is little about their personalities that we as the audience are privy to understand. Aside from their emotional connection to one another, we are given very little to care about when we see them falling in love. And thus, when we see Chloe beginning to die, it’s difficult to feel affected.

The other actors in the film don’t fare much better, either. Omar Sy, for instance, is a delightfully charismatic actor in The Intouchables, but here he’s given little to do apart from set Duris up with Tautou and react to his decisions. There’s a bit more to be said for the B plot involving Colin’s friend Chick and his love interest, Alise, but not much. Aside from having a more thorough plot, with a more decisive resolution, it isn’t given the focus it deserves.
While Mood Indigo is a welcome return to Michel Gondry’s visual inventiveness, the film falls short of being emotionally engaging.
Overall Grade: C+

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