Microbe & Gasoline

We’d say blink and you’ll miss the new film by Michel Gondry as it drops very briefly into UK cin­e­mas, but there’s a high chance it’ll pass you by even if you had your eye­lids propped open with match­sticks. And that’s a cryin’ shame, as it’s an extreme­ly love­ly movie which is whol­ly the prod­uct of the director’s whim­si­cal imag­i­na­tion. But there are those instances where unteth­ered cre­ation can serve to set the sto­ry at a remove from the human char­ac­ters – to make them com­po­nents with­in an arti­fi­cial con­struct. With this, Gondry has tried to imag­ine how cre­ativ­i­ty would gen­uine­ly man­i­fest itself with­in the mind of a 14 year old.

With Microbe & Gaso­line, Gondry tells a sto­ry set in his birth­place of Ver­sailles in which he sup­plants him­self in to the frontal lobes of his two teen heroes – Ange Dargent’s Daniel (aka Microbe, due to his diminu­tive stature) and Théophile Baquet’s Theo (aka Gaso­line, due to his smell). The for­mer is a bud­ding artist with an eccen­tric fam­i­ly life and par­ents who appear to have drift­ed apart from one anoth­er. The lat­er drifts into town wear­ing his red fake-leather bik­er jack­et and blue track­ie bot­toms, while rid­ing a moun­tain bike which he’s mod­i­fied with loud-speak­er and a sound effects board. It’s not long before the pair become fast friends.

Daniel pines for one of his female class­mates who won’t give him a sec­ond glance, while Theo receives dai­ly abuse from his par­ents, peers and just about any­one with whom he comes into con­tact. Yet, he’d built of stur­dier stock and takes none of it to heart. And so they decide to do what any­one their age would in such a sit­u­a­tion: they build a car in the shape of a house by using a recon­di­tioned lawn­mow­er engine and an old shed, and take to the French high­ways to locate a rur­al sum­mer camp run by large breast­ed women from Theo’s youth.

Gondry teth­ers the boys’ cre­ative tenac­i­ty to the bounds of real­i­ty, so their sto­ry sel­dom (if ever) strays beyond the cred­i­ble. The film’s great­ness derives less from the inven­tion on show, and more for the moments of heart­break­ing pathos regard­ing the pair’s uncer­tain future and the real­i­sa­tion that their jour­ney is per­haps a cry for help and a sym­bol of their lone­li­ness. It resem­bles Joe Dante’s won­der­ful Boy’s Own adven­ture flick, The Explor­ers, and well as the clas­sic come­dies of Abbott and Costel­lo. The final shot, too, is immense and heart­break­ing, on a dime it recon­tex­u­alis­es the entire film that came before. Do seek this one out.