A
retrospective on the films of Michel Gondry. Stephen Collings
looks at one of the more original filmmakers – the
quirkysomethings – working in Hollywood today
Hollywood cinema is often criticised for
being driven by technology with most modern films resolutely
'high concept', where the entire plot can be summed up by
the tagline, or even the title itself (Snakes
On A Plane,
anyone?). Happily, there is a growing trend for films that
require a more active audience, ready to surrender a few
brain cells to the imaginations of Hollywood's new set of
quirkysomethings. Whilst the likes of Terry Zwigoff (Ghost
World), Alexander Payne (Sideways) and Wes Anderson (The
Royal Tenenbaums) are fine exponents of offbeat comedies,
a certain cadre of directors take the notion of offbeat and
wrest it further off its hinges. And in doing so, these graduates
from the world of MTV and music promos are opening up exciting
new cinematic landscapes. Cult scribe Charlie Kaufman may
have propagated this seismic shift of creativity but his
favoured directors, Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich)
and Michel Gondry (Human Nature, The
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) seem to have ridden this new wave to creative
autonomy. Firmly in the Kaufman mould, Gondry returns this
month with the much-anticipated The
Science Of Sleep, written
by the director himself, and only his third full-length feature
to date.
In the early days of cinema, long
before audiences were entertained with such forward-thinking
notions as colour film or even sound, directors and filmmakers
alike had to rely on imagination as the most powerful tool
in the cinematic arsenal. In contrast to supposed innovators
like George Lucas who had computers on their side, the
tricks and techniques of French magician and filmmaker
Georges Méliès
(1861-1938), while almost single-handedly inventing modern
fantasy cinema, came from a desire to push the limitations
of not only technology but to recreate on screen the worlds
of dreams; worlds that are limited only by the human capacity
for imagination. It is these unrealities that inspire Gondry,
creeping right through his remarkable film oeuvre.
Born and raised in Versailles, France,
Gondry's love of the moving image began with a self-built
Zoetrope (constructed from Meccano) and paper flipbooks. “I was drawing from
a very young age,” he later commented. “I liked
it. When people know you can draw they ask you to draw different
things, so it's as though you're already part of society.
If you're good at drawing you have a social role, however
young you are. And you produce something tangible at the
same time as being creative.”
Gondry soon headed to art college
in Paris, finding a creative outlet playing drums for the
band Oui Oui, for whom he also took charge of music promo
production. Utilising the stop motion techniques honed
in his childhood, these evocative shorts achieved rotation
on MTV where they caught the attention of former Sugarcubes
singer, Björk, who was then embarking
on her illustrious solo career. Revitalising the music video
genre, Gondry's first promo for the Icelandic songstress, “Human
Behaviour”, was a Grimm fairytale, a visual feast of
animated moths and camera trickery that featured her running
through a forest from a large (and presumably hungry) teddy
bear. When Björk sings “there is definitely, definitely
no logic”, the majority of the MTV audience might well
have nodded in agreement, but there is always more to Gondry's
work than meets the proverbial eye. The use of animated models,
richly textured composites and screen projections are just
a few of the visual techniques that Gondry continues to explore
in his surreal playground.
Since then, Gondry has enjoyed a fruitful
artistic relationship with Björk. In “Army Of Me”, Gondry adapted
the industrial soundscape of her album, Post, with a nightmarish
vision of an industrialised city inhabited by gorilla-suited
dentists and monster trucks powered by diamonds, while his
promo for “Hyperballad” similarly embraces the
modern; the singer's digitised face is projected over her
sleeping form, while a crudely pixelated mini-Björk
jumps off cliffs constructed from paper. Though his representation
of the free-associated imagery described in Björk's
dreamscape is visually arresting, it's the precision of the
sound editing, matching flashing lights with glockenspiel
notes, that sets the video aside from its contemporaries.
Gondry's videos are journeys that
need to be followed until the end, even when the narrative,
like his video for Cibo Matto's “Sugar/Water”, is told with palindromic
split screens. Often the seemingly mundane and even repetitive
events on screen are subtle conceits to Gondry's grand concepts.
On Daft Punk's “Around The World”, a small ensemble
of retro robotic dancers move around a limited set, yet each
person on screen represents an element of the music. In this
interpretive dance, figures move up and down steps as the
music moves up and down the scale. Gondry took this idea
further in The Chemical Brothers' “Star Guitar”,
which, on the surface at least, is just one long shot of
the rolling landscape as seen from a train window. Again,
each part of the scenery is repetitive, but every passing
train, pylon or house represents an element of the music,
from the percussion to the melody, almost as if the landscape
itself was composing the song.
Even when Gondry works with populist
artists like The White Stripes or Kylie Minogue, his videos
still resemble avant-garde shorts, even if the mundane
suddenly springs to life in a dance routine worthy of Busby
Berkeley. His stop-motion triumph, transforming The White
Stripes into animated Lego bricks for “Fell In Love With A Girl”, demonstrates
Gondry's understanding of the immediacy of postmodern pop
iconography and his reluctance to put away his childish things.
Gondry treats every promo as a conceptual short film opportunity;
like his fellow countryman Méliès, who used
spatial trickery to create the illusion that he was inflating
a man's head, Gondry uses similar devices in The White Stripes' “The
Denial Twist”. As if the world was a literal hall of
mirrors, the pallid duo's bodies are constantly adapting
to their amorphous bodies, distorting ideas of relativity
and space.
Gondry's unique sense of aesthetics earned him a succession
of commercial contracts including Gap, Smirnoff, Air France,
Nike, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Polaroid and Levi's and, predictably,
Gondry soon showed up on the Hollywood radar, to direct his
first feature movie Human Nature in 2001. Based on a Kaufman
screenplay, this quirky comedy stars Rhys Ifans as a feral
man who attracts the attentions of naturalist Patricia Arquette
who, in turn, plays the lover of scientist Tim Robbins. Although
there were concerns that Gondry's conceptual talents would
not translate to feature-length narratives, the film, despite
its bizarre love triangle, was a comparatively linear affair.
Bereft of the director's usual flair, Human Nature was actually
something of a disappointment and achieved only modest returns.
However, the film still paved the
way for Gondry to direct The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind (2004), for which he again collaborated with Kaufman.
In the film, Joel (Jim Carrey) discovers that his girlfriend,
Clementine (Kate Winslet), has paid to have every memory
of him erased from her mind. Out of desperation, Joel elects
for the same treatment, but as his memories of Clementine
begin to disappear, he realises how much he still loves
her. Clearly influenced by the anti-linearity perfected
by the likes of Chris Marker (La Jetée),
Gondry irreverently leaps around through the narrative, blurring
the distinctions between what is real and what is remembered;
yet his stylish execution, evidence of his music promo experience,
ensures that he never loses his audience. The counter-intuitively
low-tech special effects, handheld camerawork and synapse-firing
jump cuts suggest a filmmaker fully engaged with his source
material, applying his artistry to every frame. The film
was a universal hit with both critics and audiences alike.
Alongside his contemporaries, Gondry
is a true transgressor of the boundaries of modern moving
image, and while he has played his part in pushing the
technological envelope – his
video for the Rolling Stone's “Like A Rolling Stone” pioneered
some of the time-bending techniques popularised in The
Matrix – his
true currency is his imagination. Of all the '90s generation
of promo wunderkinds turned feature helmers, Gondry's essential
humanism has perhaps the most crossover appeal. While Jonathan
Glazer's stylish yet ultimately bleak tales have yet to find
a significant audience and Spike Jonze has fallen off the
radar since 2002's Adaptation, Gondry looks set to steal
a march with his dreamlike worlds and fanciful explorations
of the human mind, further in evidence in The Science Of
Sleep.
Starring Gael García Bernal in only his second English-speaking
role, Sleep tells the story of Stéphane (Bernal) whose
mundane existence is brought to life in vivid dreams where
he is the host of his own TV show in a cut-and-paste wonderland
complete with cardboard cameras. Stéphane falls in
love with neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg)
who is initially charmed by his eccentricities, but is deterred
by his childish ways and amorous persistence. Instead of
pulling his head out of the clouds, Stéphane turns
to his dreamland to find ways to woo her.
Arguably Gondry's most autobiographical
piece to date, the film bears all the hallmarks of Gondry's
previous work, including fantastical animated dream sequences
and a preoccupation with the trappings of childhood. When
Stéphane's mother
comments on her son, “he has always confused his dreams
with reality”, she could easily be speaking of Gondry
himself. Without a Kaufman script to anchor Gondry's freewheeling
imagination, the film could easily have descended into a
chaotic mess of directorial doodles, but Gondry successfully
maintains the emotional core without ever slipping into scatterbrained
whimsy. It's a generally accepted idea that dreams are simply
the subconscious rationalisation of our waking hours, but
in Gondry's world, it is in the state of slumber that human
emotions are most vivid and real. Of all the private spaces
to share in life, the human mind is perhaps the most intimate.
With an exasperating videography,
Gondry shows no sign of slowing down, churning out a constant
stream of promos, shorts and even the full-length music
documentary Dave
Chappelle's Block Party, released earlier
this year. His next project, Be Kind, Rewind, is slated
to star Jack Black as a man whose magnetised brain unintentionally
destroys every tape in his friend's video store and, in
order to satisfy the store's ageing yet most loyal renter,
sets out to remake every one of the lost films, including
Back To The Future, The Lion King and Robocop. Even on
paper this sounds a fantastic prospect, and further evidence
that the conceptual quirkysomethings of cinema are continuing
the noble fight against a high-concept industry. Vive la
Révolution!
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