Set the quirk factors to eleven.

Michel Gondry, fresh off of the back of his Noam Chomsky interview film Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013), has summoned enviable energy in making this joyful picture. Somehow managing to exhibit the wackiest of his imaginative impulses, ‘Mood Indigo’ is many different shades rolled into one; at turns frenetic, but  yet melancholic too. It is an off-beat tale of love beset by illness.

The set-up is thus: when Colin (Romain Duris) comes to understand that his lover Chloe (Audrey Tautou) has developed an unusual illness of a flower growing on her lungs, he endeavours to find her a cure. In the process of his quest, we see love mixed in a compound of both optimism and desperation. With wit, charm and sadness, Gondry delicately etches a construct that calls to arms the believers and the naysayers.

With calculated guesswork, Mood Indigo is destined to astound some through its inventiveness and irritate others. The latter may well lose patience with the self-consciously ditzy shenanigans that incessantly interrupt proceedings. But to dismiss its well-intentioned and outstretched arms is also to cold-heartedly close the door on ingenuous filmmaking with a twinkle in its eye and smile on its face.

There is more invention in a 5 minute segment of this film that what there is in the whole of thePirates of the Caribbean franchise, for example.

It is nice to see Duris and Tautou paired up again after the trilogy from Cedric Kaplisch, including Chinese Puzzle (2013), and there is also a pleasant turn from The Intouchables’s (2011) Omar Sy. Bask in wonder at the innocent, effervescent and childlike wonder that Gondry exudes. It is a special and unique place indeed.

Mood Indigo is out to buy now on DVD and Blu Ray. It can be purchased from Amazon here.