The film version of Boris Vian's Froth on the Daydream -- recently re-published as Mood Indigo in a movie-tie-in edition --, directed by Michel Gondry (see the distributor's page) has now also opened in the US -- on all of two screens this past weekend.
(Still, with a take of US $12,550 per screen, it did very well.)
The version screened in the US clocks in at 94 minutes -- despite the fact that the French original was 131 minutes in length .....
Man, I guess maybe I should give American publishers/editors who do horrible things with books-in-translation a break -- not even Knopf would rip that much out of a Murakami .....
The reviews have been ... interesting.
But at least Vian is getting some attention (usually at least -- some reviews fail to mention the source (e.g. The Village Voice)).
Choice review quotes include:
In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis is underwhelmed:
Even at its abbreviated length, Mood Indigo soon feels almost desperately interminable, a wearying experience that resembles being locked in a very small room with an exceptionally bright, pathologically self-absorbed child who will not shut up or calm down.In The Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan finds:
Wacky, surreal, insanely playful, Mood Indigo is a film that believes that too much is not enough.In the Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern suggests:
No one has ever made a movie quite like it. Mr. Gondry's French-language screen version of Boris Vian's widely celebrated, one-of-a-kind novel is feverishly cinematic and wondrously dense; it's also a touching, even haunting, tale of love and loss. Yet there's so much of so many flavors of cleverness -- a surfeit of surfeits -- that sensory overload causes aesthetic suffocation.And in New York Bilge Ebiri concludes simply:
Mood Indigo is somehow both unmissable and whisper-thin.Among those issuing grades, The Onion's A.A. Dowd gives it a "C"; at Entertainment Weekly Keith Staskiewicz says: "C+".
I'll probably wait for the DVD version -- hoping for the uncut French version. Add a Comment