Le Livre Des Solutions
Offbeat comedy by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) about a director who can no longer tolerate his producers’ endless criticism of his new film and flees to the French Cevennes with his film material.
It has been quiet around French filmmaker Michel Gondry for quite a while, but with LE LIVRE DES SOLUTIONS, the creative master craftsman opens the floodgates of his imagination again. We follow Marc, a somewhat megalomaniac director who is convinced he has created a masterpiece, but his producers say they can’t release the incomprehensible film – which is also over four hours long. Marc decides to flee with a small crew to his aunt’s country house to work on a new cut. The crew undergoes the whims of hyperactive Marc resignedly, but when the filmmaker forgets to take his pills, things threaten to derail completely.
With a good dose of humorous exaggeration, Michel Gondry sketches the woes of a creative but also quite tiresome filmmaker. Behind all the visual jokes and gags – using old-fashioned techniques such as hand-drawn animation – lies a painful semi-autobiographical story about a manic-depressive man fighting the demons in his head.