Friday the 4th, Rory Kennedy's doc Last Days In Vietnam opened 2014's Sarasota Film Festival. Having skipped this year's opening night film, my interaction with this year's fest began last night at 6:00PM with the first of the 31 films/events that make up my itinerary. Up until this post's publishing, Rodney&Roger devotees may have noticed the blog's longest hiatus from regular postings in years...
This past December 17th, my dad (Richard W. Piatt) passed away. A giving and self-sacrificial father, he instigated my very first film-going experiences -even when the films were of no particular interest to him. He saw in me a passion for cinema from a young age (if only all 3-year-olds were so easily transfixed and occupied by a movie for two straight hours) and nurtured it by exposing me to the movies that should make up any young cinephile's childhood: from sci-fi he found boring (Star Wars) to adventures he found improbable (Indiana Jones), he fed my appetite with what he knew were the meat and potatoes of movie history. One of my father's defining attributes, his "selflessness" dictated how he shared my cinematic interests with me.
Looking back at all the films my dad showed me that in retrospect I learned he truly disliked brings a smile to my face. More so though do I cherish the memories of watching the films he shared with me from passion to passion, the films he loved. With Since You Went Away, he shared with me his patriotism and taught me the concept of national idealism in ways words could never articulate. With Judy Garland's The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me In St. Louis, I came to understand his gratitude and contentedness for what he had, no matter how great or small. For my father, there wasn't just "no place like home", but he truly was in grateful awe of the "home" God gave him, "I can't believe it. Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis." And with Psycho, he showed me that when structure frames substance, celluloid can contain perfection. I'll forever miss answering unexpected phone calls to hear my mother tell me, "Dad said to call you, Psycho's on TCM."
I spent my dad's last 9 days with him in the hospital, skipping work and spending nights. It was a privilege to be there with him. I could have completed my yearly post that I pen in Blake Cook's honor while in my father's hospital room, but I chose time with him instead. Since then I've taken quite some time away from the blog to grieve and process. But I'm glad to be back and sharing words, life, and the movies.
Mood Indigo * *
Bearing a great resemblance to his previous film The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo is ALL style and NO substance. Recalling American Hustle's tongue-in-cheek opening quote: "some of this actually happened", Indigo begins with "This story is true since I made it up." It then quickly introduces us to the whimsical hybrid-filled world of Romain Duris' (far better utilized in SFF's The Big Picture) Colin whose live-in-lawyer (The Intouchables' Omar Sy using a Rubik's cube as a day planner) prepares stop-motion claymation meals for him daily, whose coffee-machine is a phonograph and piano a cocktail-maker, and whose every action is dictated by omnipotent "administrators" who communally type up his life's narrative on typewriters that whiz past them on a conveyor belt that allows them perhaps only a sentence apiece. Colin soon "meet cutes" with Audrey Tautou's (equally dull here as she was in last year's Therese Desqueyroux) Chloe over "oven-baked" desserts that are literally served off a tray of miniature ovens at a party where they dance to a song that shares her name. Even the latest dance craze (the "biglemoi") is a hybrid described as being all about interference from two sources.
After conferring with a "telescope operator" (an actual person who connects your telescope to what you're trying to see) on where to take Chloe for their first date, wouldn't you know Colin and Chloe are hovering over Paris in a crane-lifted metal cloud. From the operators of the telescope to the operator of the crane, all of Paris seems to exist only to serve Colin and Chloe's fantastical needs. A few claymation meals later, Colin and Chloe race to the alter (in a go-cart mind you) and you guessed it: literally float away into wedded bliss. But on their honeymoon, Chloe gets a bad case of water-lily-on-the-lung. Her sickness brings decay into their world, sucking the life and even size out of their home and the color straight out of the movie.
Little is made of the film's plot or its characters: boy void of personality meets girl void of personality, they fall in love, wed, she gets sick, the movie they're in turns black and white. Much is made of the creative visuals that do nothing to aid the plot and the self-contained inventions of Gondry's imagination that don't build a world but rather serve as minutely intriguing asides from the already thin storyline. Whimsy and weirdness in support of character and story can be used as brilliant tools (i.e. look to Synecdoche, New York or even this year's SFF selection The Congress), but oddity for its own sake is fruitless. As the movie draws to its conclusion, as its tone shifts to melancholy and characters utter attempts at profundity with nostalgic phrases such as, "As you go through life, spaces seem smaller", it is impossible to feel vested in characters never established beyond shallow traits. Mood: bored and impatiently awaiting the ending.
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