Review of Michel Gondry’s film “The Book of Decisions”

The film “The Book of Solutions” (Le Livre des solutions) by “cult director” Michel Gondry has been released. Having learned that the story of an inadequate director making a deranged movie is based on Gondry’s personal experience during his work on the film “Foam of Days” (2013), I was both surprised and not surprised Mikhail Trofimenkov.

While filming “Foam of Days,” real-life director Michel Gondry first took too many pills for depression, then abruptly stopped taking them. I didn’t leave the editing room for a month and a half, and was introduced to a “brain explosion” and a cocktail of “megalomania and fear.” It all ended with an acquaintance with a psychiatrist who prescribed Michel bipolar medication: who doesn’t wear it these days?

While filming his four-hour masterpiece “Each of All,” screen director Marc Becker (Pierre Ninet) had a radical quarrel with the producers. In collaboration with a film crew devoted to him, he stole all the source materials. He fled to deep France, to the house of Aunt Denise (Françoise Le Brun) to complete his opus there. And he flushed all the pills that had until then kept him in a more or less equilibrium state down the drain.

Tablets – yes. Indeed, the French creative intelligentsia has been hooked on them for several decades now: they have nothing else to do. But judging by Mark’s behavior, it is better to continue drug treatment.

The boy breaks into the bedrooms of his assistants at night to load them with more and more crazy assignments. Throws their cell phones in the sink and throws plates of spaghetti. He demands to immediately find an excellent recording studio in the remote hole where they evacuated and attract Sting himself to work on the film. He insults his always-coughing assistant Carlos (Mourad Bouduadur) for ruining the sound track by coughing, and then apologizes to him, but he apologizes so much that any normal Carlos would have stabbed him to death on the spot.

He also keeps a crazy diary, in which he writes, what can I call it, the commandments, or something, of professional success. For example: “Learn as you go.” Well, yes, of course, we all learn our profession “on the fly” all our lives. But in Mark’s case, maybe it’s better to at least learn something before taking on directing. Moreover, the only meaningful thought he expressed about his film in one hundred minutes of screen time was this: let’s edit the film backwards. Gaspar Noe, with his backwards edit of Irreversible, filmed God knows how many years ago, coughs nervously in the corner.

And, very touchingly, Mark intends to break his masterpiece in half with an animated insert about a little fox about to open his own hair salon. He plans to cut his clients’ hair with his own ears: he has scissors, scissors! A collision worthy of Italian horror films of the 1960s in the spirit of Dario Argento!

However, madness is the second talent. And a recording studio in the depths of the French mountains, where for some reason they write “Polish songs” in Yiddish, is discovered. And exhausted assistant Sylvie (Frankie Wallach) delivers an entire orchestra to the village in a way unknown to science. And it doesn’t matter that the melodies that this orchestra is about to play exist only in Mark’s head. He will break the baton of a man who doesn’t immediately attract his attention with his “bureaucratic mug”, and, conducting all parts of the body, including the butt, will create, as Michel Gondry invites us to believe, a masterpiece.

Oh yes, and Sting (Sting), at the first snap of the fingers of the deranged Mark, will record guitar riffs for his improvised melodies. Nice detail: Mark simply calls Sting Gordon. But he forbids his comrades to call him Gordon: “For you, he is Sting.”

In the meantime, Mark will arrange a gorgeous seventy-fifth birthday for Denise for the whole village, even though the whole village will snore in unison while watching “Each of All.” And he himself will be elected mayor, not really knowing what the mayor’s powers consist of: perhaps to solemnly open a new hairdressing salon a la fox.

In general, Mark will defeat everything and everyone, bury his worst enemy. He won’t sleep with any of the girls hovering around him, but he will walk along the red carpet somewhere and earn applause from a sensitive audience.

The problem is one thing. Judging by everything, and especially from the excerpts from “Each of All,” Mark is clinically untalented. So why would we watch his creative convulsions for a hundred minutes?