Michel Gondry’s new film “The Book of Solutions,” playing in Directors’ Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on the torturous life of being a creative filmmaker and begins at the heart of the matter: Marcc(Pierre Niney) is in a meeting with the producers of his new film, and they are unhappy with what he has delivered them. They’re ending the shoot, putting a new editor in charge to salvage what is already there, and his producing partner of many years finally turns his back on him. It is any filmmaker’s greatest nightmare, but one that Gondry uses as the starting point for a relentlessly joyful, wild, and fundamentally optimistic journey into a fantasy of unbridled creativity.
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Determined to make the picture he always wanted to make, Marc has editor Charlotte (Blanche Gardin) and assistant Sylvia (Frankie Wallach) immediately take the files and the equipment into their car. It takes a minute for his backstabbing producing partner Max (Vincent Elbaz) to finally realize that Marc hasn’t actually gone for a smoke on the balcony and isn’t coming back: “Marc has left with the film. He’s never smoked in his life.” This kind of absurdist humor, where adults essentially behave like very enterprising children, is the most charming part of a film, more interesting for the way it moves from one mad situation to another, powered solely by the many ideas of its dogged protagonist than for what it might have to say about creativity.
It does, however, make an unambiguous point about the connection between artmaking and mental illness, querying in passing who benefits from describing Marc’s mental health as something to be corrected. Upon arriving at the big country house of his aunt Denise (Françoise Lebrun) in the South of France, Marc’s first decision is to go off the meds that keep him calm: “I still feel sad in the morning anyway.” Going cold turkey on his treatment is obviously a bad idea, and Denise tells him so; but most importantly for Marc, this allows him to let his imagination roam free again. In this idyllic environment, away from financiers and surrounded by a small team that supports (and works for) him, he can follow his spontaneous obsessions and elaborate ideas without running into any obstacles — there, his mind cannot hurt him. At least, not immediately.
Far from embracing a romantic vision of creativity as a pure and sacred good, however, the film actually acknowledges the cruel and unfair demands that an artist can make on others. Much of the film’s humor comes from the fact that while Charlotte and Sylvia may find Marc’s suggestions to be bad or crazy ones, they still have to do what he tells them to. We are given to share in their bewilderment at his requests, always delivered with the same pitch of extreme urgency, but also in their unexpected joy when one of his ideas actually bears fruit. Gondry has a lot of fun playing, not just with the variety of Marc’s imagination but also with our expectations of how things might turn out: will Marc be able to record the score without any written music and without a conductor? Will he manage to get Sting on board for the vocals? Will his film include an animated short film about a fox named Max who opens his own hair salon?
Based on the way he jumps from side project to side project, Marc’s film “Chacun, Tout le Monde” (Anyone, Everyone) seems like a very disjointed piece of work. It follows that “The Book of Solutions” is, too, but this is a good thing: it is refreshing and endearing to watch as Gondry lets his protagonist, a version of himself, go to the end of his thoughts, even if they apparently lead nowhere. It’s a generosity Marc also allows himself, in a way: he refuses to watch his film and decides he will discover it at the premiere.
It’s a touching reference to the blind faith necessary to any act of creation but also a sly one to the complex relationship between the act of artmaking and the final object. For Marc, one isn’t less important than the other; what may look like procrastination is to him not just part of the process of creating art but part of the art itself. As such, although he is a petulant boss and does not always manage to get their forgiveness, Marc also genuinely cares about the people around him.
All tensions and contradictions at the heart of living and creating that Marc tries to solve with his Book of Solutions: a book he had begun to write as a child and calls his “masterpiece” despite having never written more than the title. Picking up his pen, he lays out a few cardinal rules in it throughout the film, and it isn’t long before they begin to contradict each other: “Start from the end,” “never listen to others,” but also “listen to others.” Pierre Niney is captivating as a character both repulsively selfish and endearingly enthusiastic, his fully embodied performance at the heart of a very warm film about the adventure of creation, the fears, and the blind trust involved in jumping into the unknown. [B+]
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