Mood Indigo & The Color Wheel — Fancy Film Fellows

Text By: Basil Swartzfager

Original Publication Date: August 21st, 2014

For the first time (and hopefully the last), I will be combining two movies into a single entry. I am justifying it in this case based on the tenuous connection of having seen both in the same day, in both the main character’s name happens to be Colin, and I thought both were pretty terrible.

Mood Indigo is mostly a showcase for Michel Gondry to direct a 45 minute OK Go! video starring Audrey Tautou that then morphs into his usual diatribe about the dangers of fantasy. But even as he snuffs the life out of the first act’s whimsy, the descent into tragedy never feels like it has cost anything real. The film’s idea of cuteness and charm is so relentlessly calculated that it never achieves a sense of spontaneity or genuine life. The second half bleakness feels like the queasy churning one gets in their stomach after eating an entire sleeve of convenience store donuts. No part of the experience, from consumption to the sugar hangover afterwards, is actually enjoyable. The only part to derive any real joy is the pre-consumption moment, when your body tricks your brain into thinking maybe it isn’t what you’re expecting. Maybe this will be different. I saw the trailer for Mood Indigo and worried that it looked horrible. But I convinced myself to be optimistic. Gondry is a talented filmmaker, maybe this will be a great film undersold by poor marketing. It was a delusion.

Critics who speak highly positively about the film have written mostly about its inventiveness. This much I can admit, is true. For most of the film’s rapid pace Gondry stuffs a new idea into every shot. Some gag, or anachronism, or Rube Goldberg-like device. And each shot lasts only a couple of seconds. So the film is stuffed, beyond stuffed, with little jokes and attempts to create a living world cartoon. But, as it happens, I have been watching quite a few early Looney Tunes cartoons lately. And where they differ from Gondry’s film is a concrete sense of place and space. They start with a location and a character, then pull as many ideas out of those two combinations as they can. Rhapsody Rabbit spends eight minutes with Bugs Bunny in front of a piano. Mood Indigo has no conception of character, and very little conception of place.

Each new shot in Colin’s apartment contains a new joke for us to look at (shoes that lace themselves, a tiny mouse running around in the background, plates of stop-motion food dancing around in Busby Berkeley-esque shapes), but each of them comes out of nowhere. There’s no sense of continuity from idea to idea, so that we establish a flow of gags. It’s merely indulgence, Gondry thinking “wouldn’t this be fun?” with no other motivation. It turns out, at least for me, it isn’t fun at all. It feels like work. It feels like a street peddler who keeps showing you a new thing that has nothing to do with the last thing, each item a desperate plea for validation. Part of comedy comes from surprise, but in building a place whose alien whimsy has no foundation in reality Gondry has created a world where anything is possible and so nothing is surprising. The elements, for the most part, also lack any metaphorical subtext to ground them. A cloud car to tour the city is not a surrealist image that stands in for genuine social commentary. Again, not that it should have to, but if it isn’t surprising it should at least mean something. The images inMood Indigo do neither.

I have similarly little understanding of Colin as a character. He is rich, he likes women to be pretty, and he falls in love with Audrey Tautou’s character, Chloe, at first sight of her. The second half of the film rehashes The Science Of Sleep in the way that it calls attention to Colin’s superficiality, his lack of grounding in the real world. But the film never achieves any depth of critique, because Colin never resembles a real person. I suppose he represents the fanciful rich youths who allow themselves all the indulgences of wealth without the work ethic of having earned it, but if that’s the film’s intention it comes at it only obliquely. And in order to have Colin’s fantasy devour itself, ending in tragedy, we have to accept that Chloe also falls in love with him. But we never see any reason why she should. Is she equally superficial to him? She has no real personality, which makes sense given that she functions mostly as a fantasy figment for Colin to latch onto. But in order to make the critique work, if that’s what Gondry was legitimately going for, Colin needs to be closer to reality. He has to be a human being. Instead neither of them are, and it makes every scene a chore to sit through because nothing feels at stake.

***

The Color Wheel is almost a completely different movie, but one that still manages to hit the same note for almost every scene until it becomes exasperating to watch. Without knowing for sure, I would guess the film is mostly improvised, as the film’s dialogue consists mostly of two siblings -- played by director Alex Ross Perry and co-writer Carlen Altman -- bickering at great length. There’s an arch stylization to the dialogue, though, as if Perry and Altman conceived of the movie as a world where everyone says the meanest thing they could be thinking at every given moment. There’s no subtlety to the passive-aggression in this film. There’s a running joke/maybe not a joke (but seems intended to make the audience laugh?) where Perry’s character, Colin, continually insists that their parents do not like Altman’s character, JR, and intentionally disinclude her from family events. It’s a horrifying, awful thing to say to another person, and also the kind of thing I find it difficult to believe someone would do so casually and without provocation.

I think “without provocation” is at the heart of my issue with The Color Wheel. Structurally it might make sense if the film was conceived as two siblings who have a shared history of animosity and the film began with them attempting to be civil and then their barriers slowly collapsed into cruelty. One could argue that this arc is the structure of most road movies, and that this film is at least unique for circumventing that structure. But being atypical does not mean being good, and the film quickly has nowhere to go once it sets up the structure of the two being awful to each other immediately. Every scene has a sameness that flatlines my invest, making me feel that the film could easily have accomplished the same goal in a twenty minute short instead of a ninety minute feature. The film does not fully stick to its conceit either, as it introduces characters and scenarios that have almost nothing to do with the film’s flow, such as a dull potshot at rural Christian conservatives in the form of an uncomfortable scene with a motel manager. In retrospect the scene has a certain foreshadowing to the film’s unexpected twist, but in the moment it feels like the film is trying hard for a bit of stale, day-old comedy.

And that’s the whole movie. A later scene has JR, who is an unemployed aspiring news anchor, run into old friends from high school and attend a party. Almost all of the conversation revolves around snide attempts to belittle JR for not doing more with her life, for exposing what a phony she is, for reveling in their superiority. I suppose I can imagine a scene like that working in a movie, but in this film the arch dialogue/conceit ends up with a bunch of people sitting around and saying petty things to her. Things that never sound like what a bunch of people at a real party would say. I’m not opposed to an arch, hyperreality in order to peel back the layers of contempt modern young adults have for one another, but I don’t think the film actually says anything interesting about those characters. While I find the show extremely hit-or-miss, I would say the most affecting and eye-opening moments of Girls achieve what The Color Wheel was attempting in a much more genuine, well-observed, and pointed way than this film ever comes close to.