No one in his right mind would accuse a filmmaker of having too much imagination, but French filmmaker Michel Gondry has so much that his flights of fancy can overwhelm his movies. When I think of Gondry, I often remember that dream sequence in The Science of Sleep (2006) in which Gael García Bernal gropes around with giant papier-mache hands—the director has an enormous hunger for ideas, but sometimes he can’t pick anything up. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is still his best film, because Charlie Kaufman’s cerebral screenplay about a company that launders people’s memories was also emotionally centered in a romantic love triangle. As a writer-director on Sleep and Be Kind Rewind (2008), Gondry had trouble summoning the kind of honest emotion needed to counterbalance his surreal visions. His best moment since Sunshine was probably a documentary, Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013), which pairs a Noam Chomsky interview with hand-drawn animation and touches unexpectedly and powerfully on the public intellectual’s private grief over the death of his wife.
Gondry has taken a lovely snapshot of children at the age when they’re first confronted with sexuality and recoil in fear, disguising it as disgust. When Microbe and his brother listen to their parents arguing in the next room, Microbe comments, “At least they’re not screwing. The idea grosses me out.” After finding the explicit drawings under Microbe’s mattress, his mother assures him, “It’s normal to masturbate at your age!” He clamps his hands over his ears and runs away. “I promise not to talk about your sexuality!” she calls after him. Gondry puts his finger on the girls as well as the boys. “They’re all so immature,” says one female student of her male classmates. But in the final shot of the movie, a girl who’s hovered on the periphery of the action stares after Microbe as he walks away, wishing he would turn around and look at her. He will someday, and it’ll be the same day he stops building motor homes out of junk.
