Moon Indigo: an all-you-can-eat buffet for the eyes – but your brain will feel famished

Your enjoyment of Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo may entirely depend on how much visual whimsy you can take, what your threshold might be, whether you can go with it or whether it wears you out and brings you to your knees. There’s animated food and little mice that zip around in cars and eels wriggling out of taps and rubbery human limbs that elongate and doorbells that scuttle like frenzied cockroaches — sit on that, Wes Anderson! You too, Terry Gilliam! — but it may be whimsy at the expense of coherence, feeling, story. My threshold is not that high, I now know.

This is an adaptation of Boris Vian’s 1947 novel L’écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream), which, apparently, has always had a cult following in France, and is always read by every French teenager, which may not be the soundest recommendation, but there you are. Vian was a polymath, novelist, poet, musician, actor, friend of Sartre, and the book, I’m given to understand, via the sort of in-depth research that can take nearly ten seconds on Wikipedia, is a surreal, sci-fi satire contemplating love, jazz and existentialism, as told through the eyes of our hero, Colin.

Colin (Romain Duris) is single and wealthy so does not have to work (for now). Colin dwells in what appears to be a pop-coloured suspended train carriage. Colin lives with a mouse (a human in a mouse costume, made miniature; has a tiny car) and those doorbells that scuttle and a piano that concocts cocktails and Nicolas (Omar Sy), whom he introduces as his ‘cook and lawyer’ but is, to all intents and purposes, his man-servant. Nicolas is black and his Driving Miss Daisy/Gone with the Wind eagerness to please, as well as later jokes referencing his sexual prowess, may be ironic.