Final Project First Draft

Celebrity Profile: Michel Gondry
By. Heain Lee

“As we dream, we unleash the forgotten emotion. Then you wake up in the morning and you need a man to be close with. I think dreams make us want to cuddle in the morning and this may have helped keep the structure of the family across the millennium.” Perhaps this Dream Theory from the short autobiographical film "I've been 12 forever" by Michel Gondry explains this talented French director’s obsession with dreams, illusions, and child-like imagination.

As a director, Gondry creates imaginative worlds that seem to exist where the consciousness and the unconsciousness overlap; alternating states of waking and sleeping – better yet, dreaming. And somewhere in between, Gondry’s signature on-screen theme springs out of romantic turmoil or joy, or sometimes both.

Most of his films tell love stories at the hazy borderline between unconscious longing for human relationships and clear reality. “Human Nature” is a love story about a man who is modestly endowed, a woman whose body is covered in thick black hair and a feral man-child; “The Science of Sleep” is based on a broken love affair where nothing quite works out between Stephane, an inventor who is lost in his own dreams, and his neighbor Stephanie. They have an odd sort of affair, interrupted by sequences of dreams that reveal Stephane’s innermost thoughts; In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Gondry explores the possibility of permanently erasing painful reminders of a former lover from one’s mind. These films carefully dissect the psychological complexities of people through the characters.

These clashes between the real and the imagined create a surreal, chaotic reality. The audience does not immediately understand what they are seeing and Gondry understands the appeal of disorientation very well.

However, his debut film, and the most controversial of all, “Human Nature,” an absurdist parable about the wish to conform a human heart into a civilized mind through the experience of training a wild man, is arguably too absurd. Although there is a hint of romance buried in the film, the premise is too extreme to be emotionally convincing and the movie ended up being a commercial flop. In a way Gondry’s works are more radical and provocative than those of the most avant-garde artists, who use the strategy of doing something socially unacceptable to shock the world. Gondry doesn’t try to outdo or subvert high art. Like the character in the film, Gondry playfully fades back and forth into the art world without seeming to notice, as if it weren’t even such a big deal in the first place.

In his new release “Be Kind Rewind,” Gondry creates a new term called Sweding with the meaning of “putting YOU into the thing you like.” There is a subtle strain of populist defiance buried in the idea. Pop culture is, too often, understood as a top-down enterprise that the public passively consume in its expensive, hierarchal, and disposable product form. Yet, at the same time, all the things are assigned sentimental values as we develop a deep and durable sense of ownership. Gondry’s films belong to us, and part of us lives inside them in some profound way.

However, his off-the-wall imaginations are often criticized for being puerile. Gondry's works are marked with a child-like explorative eye and the jumble of unfolding events usually occur in the handmade prop sets that resemble children’s craft projects. In his defense, Gondry uses his low-tech special effects to enhance the drama in his movies, never just for show. Plus, not everyone can figure out how to turn pizza and cardboard boxes into special effects in remaking Rush Hour 2 as Gondry does in “Be Kind Rewind.”

In a 2006 New York Times interview with Lynn Hirschberg, Gondry said that, “other than being childish, the criticism that [he] most often receive[s] is that [he] can’t really tell a story. That while [he] has a strong sense of the visual, [his] narrative skills are weak.” He defended himself by saying, “I would like to think, instead, that my movies are more like real life. In a relationship, so much goes unsaid, but that doesn’t mean the emotion is not felt. In my films, I want to show all the abstract ways that people can affect us when we are in love.”

Gondry also confesses that he was upset by the turn out of “Human Nature” but he had learned a valuable lesson: audiences will not accept the flights of fantasy if they can’t identify with the characters and their dilemmas. In that sense, dreams and imaginations in his films become useful means that allow the repressed parts of the mind to be satisfied through fantasy and also let the mind express things that would normally be suppressed in the waking world.

Characters in Gondry’s works are heroic and flawed, attractive and unattractive simultaneously while remaining unpretentious. He tells stories about people and their lives while questioning our definitions of reality. His characters are honest and human and his worlds playfully reflect the interaction between the worlds we live in: nature, society, and the mind.

This light-hearted and almost silly approach to a more philosophical issue about people’s relationships is what makes Gondry’s career so successful. It is refreshing to watch a film that is giddy, goofy and, ultimately, tender but still makes you think. The Kidult syndrome of grown-ups enjoying things that are usually thought as more childish although they are not necessarily socially immature, further explains why such juvenile narratives and visuals have become popular in today’s society. According to Gondry, “childhood occupies the biggest part of your brain” and “childhood is a wondrous stage of our lives and we should not be in such a hurry to finish it as though it were some terrible inconvenience.”

Gondry’s world of visual marvel allows his audience to revisit their childhood as they dream a little dream that are made of ‘love, friendships, relationships, and all those –ships’ as Stephane explains in “Science of Sleep.”