Unrealistic Reality
michel gondry relives childhood in fantasy
When would-be audiences are confronted with the premise for acclaimed director Michel Gondry’s newest venture, Be Kind Rewind, the general consensus is that it won’t play in Peoria. Outrageous and erratic Jerry (Jack Black, of course) accidentally demagnetizes all the tapes at the video store where his friend Mike (Mos Def) works, so the pair takes advantage of Ms. Kimberley, the store’s only loyal—and conveniently senile—customer. To save Mike’s job, they decide to reshoot the films she wants to rent. Their plan presents a glaring question: why don’t they just buy other copies of the cheap VHS films?
But Michel Gondry is a director who has made a name out of “unplayable” stories. We believed Stéphane Miroux’s euphorically childish view of the world in The Science of Sleep, and we believed Dr. Howard Mierzwiak as he explained his patented memory-erasing procedure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Before that, and before Gondry’s blockbuster success, the director paved a road through unrealistic reality by making music videos that pushed perceptual boundaries (for artists like Björk, Daft Punk, and the White Stripes), and short films like “La Lettre” and “One Day...” His art showcases his unique childlike vision and painfully tender worldview.
Declaring, “I’ve been 12 forever,” Gondry has looked to his childhood experiences for inspiration. We see impressions in the “Fell in Love With a Girl” music video, which is made up entirely of Lego bricks, when Dave Grohl’s hands expand in the “Everlong” music video only to be matched with a gigantic telephone (reminiscent of one of Gondry’s childhood nightmares), and when Stéphane and Stéphanie eagerly plan to help the lost boat finds its “mer” among floating cotton ball clouds and a cellophane sea in The Science of Sleep. Obsessed with the dreams, nightmares, and feelings of inadequacy that shook his childhood, Gondry recreates them to produce refreshingly innovative, sincere films that rush to viewers’ hearts. Nostalgically referring to childhood without being trite, Gondry pushes forward, shocking movie theatres and TV screens with his expressionistic, surrealist odes to a time when the world was unreasonable, illogical, and hurtful, but still meant everything to the hopeful individual.
The 2003 collection, The Work of Director Michel Gondry, offers invaluable insight into the mind of this celebrated director. After recounting an important lesson his musician father taught him—that inspiration is the thing that sticks two blocks together to form an idea—Gondry mentions that the most satisfying part of his job is bringing his ideas to life. Accordingly, to see a Michel Gondry film is to gain true insight into the mind of a deeply sensitive man who is completely attuned to the world around him. Guided by his obsession with dreams and memory, Gondry recreates the mind with non-sequential chronology, visible editing, stop motion animation, and intricately built sets.
In a time of booming reality TV and YouTube fads, audiences want to be voyeurs—they want to see the private parts of people’s lives. From his innocent perspective, Michel Gondry fulfills this desire. Gondry knows exactly how to capture and articulate the most personal parts of people without being verbose and without being trite. This characterstic sensitivity is evidenced throughout his oeuvre—when Stéphane Miroux in The Science of Sleep lays out his next-day work clothes in the shape of a person, when Erykah Badu tears her huge wig off mid-performance in Block Party, and during Joel Barish’s self-deprecating thought about his incapability to make eye contact with a woman he doesn’t know in Eternal Sunshine.
He not only gives his audiences the chance to be voyeuristic, but also shows them a whole new perspective on the everyday and refuses to block out the unmentionables: burps, farts, feces, sex, and nose-picking are not forgotten in the wonderful world of Gondry. In “One Day...,” a turd comes to life, declaring Gondry its father and following him around all day. In Human Nature, Lila’s “hair condition” mocks artificial societal expectations, and in Gondry’s advert for Levi’s, a young man buys condoms from his local drugstore only to find out that his date is the drugstore clerk’s daughter. At the core of this director is a secretive world rife with insecurities, secrets, uncensored thought and, ahem, “human processes.” For most, childhood represents a time when these things are magnified, but for Gondry, it is not mere representation—it is true to everything that he is.
Be Kind Rewind, which will be released on Feb. 22, does not stray too far from Gondry’s repertoire. In fact, despite the initial assumptions that Be Kind Rewind will not play, Michel Gondry explores pertinent issues in his newest film: namely, the current copyright battles that plague the entertainment industry. True to his oeuvre, when the two friends make amateur reconstructions of popular titles, Gondry reawakens the creative, youthful, inquisitive spirit of cinema, which is subsequently threatened by the various copyright restrictions filmmakers face today. Gondry leaps into a fantasy-world rooted in reality with his trademark saturated colors and hand-crafted knick-knacks. And despite the criticism that it is “unplayable,” Be Kind Rewind, with its exploration of a very tangible and timely issue, looks to be Gondry’s most realistic film to date.