‘The Book of Solutions’: The overflowing and unhealthy imagination of Michael Gondry

Following the “WTF moment” with Netflix executives in Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow, we now have the second film of the year featuring a no doubt autobiographical moment in which an assumed stand-in for the work’s director endures the blather of some disapproving movie producers. “You can’t see the actors”; “It doesn’t make sense; “It’s blurry”; “There might be a story, but I don’t see it” — these are just some of the phrases that the French filmmaker Michel Gondry must have heard at some point in his career. And in The Book of Solutions, Gondry’s first feature-length work in eight years, the director reveals his unique approach to filmmaking as a kind of adventure, or an exercise in schizophrenia.

Two decades ago, with the release of the enormously successful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless (2004), written by the wonderful Charlie Kaufman, Gondry became known as one of the world’s great imaginative filmmakers — the last heir of the fantastical cinema of Georges Méliès, whose magical creations could bring anything to life on screen. With Gondry’s full-length films, short films, and music videos, the viewer never quite knew what to expect. This lack of control, compounded by Gondry’s deep sense of melancholy, was accompanied by pleasurable periods of excitement — emphasized in titles like Be Kind Rewind (2008), The Science of Sleep (2006) and his fascinating contribution to the collective anthology Tokyo! (2008) — which he developed earlier in music videos he directed for The White Stripes, Beck, Björk and The Chemical Brothers, as well as in his famous commercials and numerous short films (most memorably, One Day…, the story of a man haunted by his own poop).

Gondry’s name, however, has faded somewhat from the minds of cinephiles and film distribution companies alike, perhaps for personal reasons suggested by the story of The Book of Solutions itself. In fact, the excellent Microbe and Gasoline (2015), Gondry’s penultimate feature film, was not even commercially released in Spain. And in the eight years since, he has preferred to take refuge in shorter works: his own short films as well as directing episode of TV series created by others.

The Book of Solutions has its ups and downs, but on the whole is a great film. It is a sincere and, at the same time, magical and comical look at an artist attempting to channel his creativity. With actor Pierre Niney playing a young version of Gondry himself, or a memory of what he was, the director portrays himself as a medicated neurotic — “sad in the mornings, manipulated in the afternoons” — who, after being removed by the producers from a shoot before he could film the fifth act, flees with what he had already shot, along with a group of faithful collaborators, to prevent another editor from stealing the story.

Gondry’s signature fast-moving cameras are back, to emphasize the stress, bewilderment, or extra motivation of his characters, as well as his sense of absurdity, almost childish humor, and naive romanticism. A moral comedy about creation, The Book of Solutions gets somewhat diluted in the final scenes, but with its beautiful professional inventiveness (the musical sequence with the orchestra) and the conflict between a motto of impulsivity (“Start your project before doubts dampen your motivation”) and a motto of self-control (“If it’s something no one has done before, maybe that’s because it’s not a good idea”), the film bequeaths a portrait that transcends itself to touch the impetus of imagination, the shadow of arrogance, and even the bliss of ridicule.

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