Michel Gondry’s follow-up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the first time the inventive French pop promo wizard has made a fiction feature without a Charlie Kauffman script.
If you’re thinking this may mean more of a conventional narrative though, you’d be wrong. If anything, without Kauffman’s understanding of narrative structure, Gondry has produced a dense stream-of-consciousness portrait of the dizzying effects of l’amour fou.
As we’ve come to expect, it’s a wildly inventive idiosyncratic vision.
Arthouse heart-throb of the moment Gael Garcia Bernal (Bad Education, Motorcycle Diaries and Babel – also showing at Screening Days) continues his impressive string of charismatic leading men, this time playing an emotionally arrested romantic who falls for his neighbour (Charlotte Gainsbourg).
Much of the film is narrated from within Bernal’s imagination, allowing Gondry to string together a slew of charmingly lo-fi sketches that mix stop-motion animation, puppetry and his trademark in-camera set-play to illustrate the chasm between romantic imagination and the considerably more pragmatic reality of getting to know the quite literally beautiful girl next door.