Marc (Pierre Niney) is not an easy director. He refuses to view the images of his last film on which his editor Charlotte spent hours. He no longer wants to take anxiolytics to control his fears and emotions. And when the producers tell him that someone other than him is going to finish his feature film to avoid a financial wreck, he takes to their heels with his rushes and his editing bench. Head to the Cévennes, where the only person who can understand him lives, his great-aunt Denise (touching Françoise Lebrun). There, with his editor (Blanche Gardin in a calm register which sparks with the ardor of Pierre Niney) and his stage manager (very funny Frankie Wallach), he tries to do a tabula rasa and find inspiration. It boils so much in Marc's head that the others have trouble following him. He needs a truck to transform it into an editing room, a house in ruins, an orchestra to play the music for the film he is thinking of improvising while singing... He even decides to be the mayor of the village . But will he be able to finish this disaster movie?
To give substance to Marc, director Michel Gondry drew inspiration from his own life, he explains after the screening of the Book of Solutions at the Théâtre de la Croisette. "Self-mockery is a material that allows me to build this story and make people laugh, because some situations are as ridiculous as they are funny," he says.
Marc is therefore a wacky, impulsive and depressive alter ego. A movie handyman. A filmmaker who can take three chairs and garden hoses to create a scene or craft a 5-minute cartoon about a fox who wants to open a barber shop so he can be inserted in the middle of a movie and invent "the intermission of cinema". Michel Gondry was right in entrusting Pierre Niney with the task of playing his double, "Clown Gondry", a filmmaker as tortured as he is explosive.
The former actor of the French has enormous comic potential. He multiplies the stunts and the disconcerting changes of tone. The mechanics work wonderfully. Pierre Niney's energy contrasts with the calm of his friends. It pulses at a furious pace of gags. We also laugh out loud so frequently that the abdominal belt ends up exploding.
Eight years after Micro et Gasoil (2015) about the adventures of two children, the former director of Daft Punk and Björk music videos is rediscovering the grain of creative madness that led him to offer us the cult romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004. He even went to film at his aunt's house to immerse himself in his own world. In competition at the Quinzaine des cinéastes, Michel Gondry signs a winning return which bodes well for great success in theaters for the Book of Solutions when it is released. Hilarious !
"The Book of Solutions", at the Quinzaine des cinéastes. Release date not communicated.
