Mood Indigo (2013)

Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo arrives with a flower, a lung, and an excess of whimsy. Colin (Romain Duris) lives in a clockwork Paris where a piano mixes cocktails and a mouse delivers commentary. He marries Chloé (Audrey Tautou), and a water lily takes root in her chest. From there the film bleeds out its color as Colin bleeds out his fortune, trading invention for decay. It is an adaptation of Boris Vian's 1947 novel, and it commits without apology to its own strange physics.

The cast is more diverse than the average French production of its moment. Omar Sy and Aïssa Maïga hold substantial supporting roles as Nicolas the cook and Alise, and the film lets them simply exist inside the story. Nobody remarks on it. No subplot turns on identity, and no line of dialogue invites us to applaud the arrangement. The diversity is a fact of the ensemble, not a thesis about it.

Elsewhere the film keeps its politics folded away. Chloé is a patient, not a protagonist; she weakens, and the camera stays with Colin's grief and his errands. The slide into poverty is personal misfortune, played for melancholy, never for economic argument. The surrealism serves heartbreak, not a message. Neither race, nor sexuality, nor the body, nor the climate, nor the mind's wiring becomes a subject for instruction. There is only a sad, gorgeously overbuilt romance about a man who cannot buy his wife another year. It has no interest in telling us how to live. It only wants to show us how it feels to lose.