![]() ![]() As in his previous films, there are hints of Richard Lester, Jan Švankmajer and Terry Gilliam. The fantasy always stops a millimetre short of being annoying, or perhaps it is that it goes exactly a millimetre beyond being annoying. Sometimes these flourishes are funny, sometimes just weird, but their sheer inventive persistence prevents them being tiresome. The story unfolds in a crazy world of kaleidoscopic kidulthood which gets more sombre and monochrome as things proceed: not a single scene or frame goes past without the cymbal clash of wackiness or the splat of surreality. This is a return to type and a return to form: a sort of love story and a sort of Love Story. The result was a very conventional clunker. Whatever else he is, Gondry is an object lesson in the dangers of abandoning your vision and selling out: in 2011, he took the studio dollar and made a conventional superhero action-comedy The Green Hornet, with Seth Rogen. ![]() Gondry certainly has to be one of the most distinctive film-makers, best known for his hugely admired Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, all about the imaginary neuroscience of removing unpleasant memories, although I personally preferred his equally strange The Science of Sleep, with Gael García Bernal as the host of a homespun fantasy-TV show being recorded in his own bedroom. ![]() T he elegant, eccentric inventions of the French director Michel Gondry have made him an acquired taste and a divisive figure, and this new surreal excursion will for many be like eating an anvil-sized block of Marmite, drinking liquid Marmite and breathing Marmite in gaseous form. ![]()
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