The Book of Solu­tions – first-look review

Michel Gondry’s pro­tag­o­nists are often dream­ers, tin­ker­ers, or oth­er­wise stand-ins for the direc­tor; his films fre­quent­ly reflect on his whirligig, hand­made cre­ativ­i­ty, and reveal a hid­den core of melan­choly beneath all the papi­er-máché sets, card­board props, and snarls of D.I.Y. elec­tric wiring. Sci­ence of Sleep, for instance, is about an aspir­ing artist and illus­tra­tor of whim­si­cal draw­ings, who strug­gles with lone­li­ness and fails to con­nect with oth­ers; the teenaged title char­ac­ters of Microbe and Gaso­line, who build a house-on-wheels from scrap and dri­ve it around France, use art and craft to over­come their youth­ful insecurities. 

With The Book of Solu­tions, Gondry offers his most explic­it author sur­ro­gate yet, as well as his harsh­est self-cri­tique. Both a cute, crowd-pleas­ing com­e­dy and a con­fes­sion, the film stars Pierre Niney as an antic direc­tor who strug­gles to buck­le down and fin­ish his next movie while engag­ing in mon­strous­ly self­ish behav­ior, notably the ver­bal abuse and intim­i­da­tion of the under­lings ded­i­cat­ed to enabling his wildest dreams.

As the film opens, Marc Beck­er (Niney) is fired by his pro­duc­ers from his own film, an unfin­ished, four-hour sur­re­al­ist peri­od piece which, in snip­pets, looks like Gondry’s Mood Indi­go, which ran over bud­get and was ulti­mate­ly released in the U.S. in a trun­cat­ed cut. Scrap­pi­ly, with the aid of his edi­tor and a few oth­er devot­ed col­lab­o­ra­tors (includ­ing one woman whom Marc, in voiceover, sens­es will ​“save” him), Marc lib­er­ates the footage and retires to a coun­try house to fin­ish the edit—as Gondry did in real life.

The house belongs to Marc’s aunt Denise, mod­eled on Gondry’s own aunt Suzette, the sub­ject of his doc­u­men­tary The Thorn in the Heart, to whom Book of Solu­tions is ded­i­cat­ed. As played by the beatif­ic Françoise Lebrun, Denise is kind, patient, sup­port­ive; when Marc sits at the kitchen table, head in hands, in a heap of despair, Denise gen­tly lifts him back up, out of her way, so she can con­tin­ue clean­ing. One sees that Marc must have been a lov­able and loved child, encour­aged up his peaks of ener­gy and indulged through his val­leys of self-pity.

Going off his anti­de­pres­sants cold turkey, Marc is full of ideas, each of which he pur­sues with speed-ramp vig­or until he aban­dons it halfway through, because he has a new idea and needs to chase it before he for­gets what it is. He teach­es him­self new skills, from car­pen­try to com­po­si­tion, and Gondry embell­ish­es the action with the kind of sur­re­al, wide-eyed doo­dles that have char­ac­ter­ized his work since his ear­ly music videos: when Marc stays up into the wee small hours to build a stop-motion ani­ma­tion set-up, you can bet Gondry will show us the film he makes, about a paper cut-out fox and his var­i­ous adventures.

Niney, with his wide eyes, ner­vous mouth, and flighty ges­tures, per­fect­ly embod­ies the agile, hyper­ac­tive spir­it of Gondry’s films; when Marc announces that he’ll com­pose the score to his film on the fly, he con­ducts the orches­tra through a rub­bery, impro­vised inter­pre­tive dance, it’s a use­ful pré­cis of the whole Gondry project, will­ful­ly ama­teur and infec­tious­ly joy­ful. You can see why Marc’s crew risked their careers to fol­low him to chez Denise; why they per­mit him to micro­man­age them because he has just such a bril­liant idea (edit the film back­wards!), or to wake them up in the mid­dle of the night with urgent requests only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to their nom­i­nal jobs; why they for­give him when he just can’t help him­self from throw­ing tantrums, break­ing plates, and lash­ing out cru­el­ly, den­i­grat­ing their work with vicious, per­son­al vit­ri­ol, when­ev­er he receives even the slight­est setback. 

He’s a per­fect solip­sist, who takes every cough from his assis­tant edi­tor as a per­son­al affront and con­spir­a­cy to destroy his focus, and calls his assis­tant a cow­ard and an under­min­er for push­ing back against one of his worst ideas. He can’t help it, he’s just so antsy over his art.

A large­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic style, and speci­fici­ty about details like Marc’s meds, ground this auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film square­ly in its creator’s psy­chol­o­gy, but Gondry keeps the tone light­ly com­ic, even as his main character’s unstop­pable tor­rent of ideas becomes increas­ing­ly man­ic. His wit­ty voiceover – always endear­ing­ly unself-aware – becomes increas­ing­ly grandiose and delud­ed as he descends into para­noia and vio­lent fan­ta­sy (there is a con­spir­a­cy board), which drew some of the film’s biggest laughs at the screen­ing I attended. 

The crit­i­cal dis­tance Gondry estab­lish­es from his very charis­mat­ic on-screen avatar shows the cre­ative dis­ci­pline lack­ing in Marc’s work, and the per­spec­tive lack­ing in his behav­ior until the film ends with apolo­gies and self-dep­re­ca­tion. Gondry makes the tale of how he weaponizes his neu­ro­di­ver­gence to manip­u­late peo­ple around him adorable in the telling. He’s impos­si­ble to stay mad at, that lit­tle devil.