L'Écume des jours (2013)
Directed by Michel Gondry

Film Review

Boris Vian's cult 1947 novel L'Écume des jours (translated as Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo and Foam of the Daze) is not a work that translates naturally to the screen.  A literary phantasmagoria replete with dreamlike constructs and visual puns, it poses the most extraordinary challenges for any writer and director seeking to adapt it for the cinema.  There have so far been two attempts to do this: L'Écume des jours (1968) by French director Charles Belmont, and Kuroe (2001) by the Japanese filmmaker Gô Rijû.  Neither of these adaptations does justice to Vian's idiosyncratic stylised novel, and the reaction to the most recent version by Michel Gondry has been predictably mixed.

With his penchant for uninhibited visual inventiveness, Gondry would seem to be the ideal candidate to adapt Vian's book.  His 2006 film La Science des rêves gave the familiar French rom-com the mother of all makeovers, effortlessly merging reality and fantasy into a surreal fable that is as funny as it is true to life.  L'Écume des jours allows Gondry to go one step further and takes us on a fantastic voyage of the imagination, showing us how the classic tragic romance might be perceived by an artist of his imaginative prowess whilst under the influence of powerful mind-altering drugs.  As is perhaps inevitable with a film that revels in its own bravado, it does occasionally lose its way in its blizzard of visual gimmickry.  The characters appear more like marionettes than real people, as soulless as the mechanical marvels that Gondry conjures up for us.  L'Écume des jours is not an easy ride for the conventionally minded, but for those who have the stomach for a wild cinematic roller coaster now and again, this exotic foray into grade-A weirdness has its rewards.

Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou (a producer's dream pairing if ever there was one) are effectively cast as the star-crossed lovers who live in a strange 'other reality' that feels like a random amalgam of every decade of the 20th century.  The couple had previously enjoyed a slightly less off-the-wall romantic entanglement in Cédric Klapisch's popular rom-coms L'Auberge espagnole (2002) / Les Poupées russes (2005), but they appear (bizarrely) more at home in Gondry's surreal fun factory, perhaps because both actors have already lived something of a fairytale in their own lives, neither expecting to become internationally recognised film stars.  Every decent pack of cards has at least one joker and in this case it is Omar Sy, another actor who became an accidental star, through the hit 2011 film Intouchables.  Sy (arguably the coolest thing in French cinema at the moment) plays the film's most interesting character, an all-knowing, all-doing factotum-cum-guardian angel who could give Jeeves a good run for his money.  Without this charismatic threesome to provide some sense of reassuring familiarity, watching this film would be like trying to make your way through an Arctic snowstorm with your eyes closed.

And then there are the effects - not the kind of mind-blowing computer-generated effects that no self-respecting sci-fi film, TV series or car commercial can do without these days, but the kind that livened up children's television in the 1970s, providing prominent but short-lived careers for shape-changing Plasticine men and such like.  Gondry's almost religious devotion to old-fashioned special effects is what ultimately saves the film and prevents it from collapsing into a rather distasteful orgy of facile visual excess.  There is no CGI skulduggery in Gondry's madcap universe, just the old tried-and-trusted techniques that served cinema well before the digital revolution: stop motion animation, rear projection ('green screen') and mechanical effects.  The effects may sometimes appear pretty basic but they have a kind of organic reality and charm, qualities that are distinctly lacking in today's slick computer generated effects.

There can be little doubt that L'Écume des jours is the oddest and most dazzlingly zany French film of the year so far.  For all its chaotic whimsy, it does take us into some pretty dark places, reminding us of the transience of life, the cruelty of the workplace and the absurdity of existence.  What begins as an exuberant riot of fun ends in a monochrome mire of melancholia, and it is hard not to be moved as the colour ebbs from the protagonists' lives as it does from the film itself - the slow, ineluctable fade-to-black that is the curse of all living things.  The most fanatical devotees of Boris Vian's famous novel will doubtless regard Michel Gondry's efforts as sacrilege or wanton vandalism, but judged on its own merits Gondry's L'Écume des jours has its own touch of genius, a film that is both deliriously eccentric and hauntingly poetic - a true cinematic one-off.

Film Synopsis

Colin is the archetypal happy bachelor.  He has wealth and health and sees life as one perpetual party, his every need catered for by his faithful man-servant Nicolas.  Then he meets Chloé and his life is changed forever.  Deeply in love, they hasten to get married, but on their honeymoon Fate deals them a devastating hand: Chloé discovers she has a life-threatening illness.  To pay for the medical treatment that may save his wife's life, Colin has no choice but to take on work in conditions that become increasingly desperate.  Around them, their once lovely apartment slowly deteriorates and their circle of friends starts to dwindle...