The World Of Material Emotions - Reviews

Foam days / L'ecume des jours (2013)

Director: Michel Gondry

Cast: Audrey Tautou, Jean-Pierre Daroussen, Jamel Debbouz, Romain Duris, Gad Elmaleh

Awards: Cesar Prize (2013) for Best Artist

Can a person resist society? Is love an all-conquering force? Both of these questions are answered in the negative in the film.

A young rich man, Colin, lives carelessly surrounded by doorbells running around the apartment, self-tying laces and other wonderful things. One day he meets a beautiful girl Chloe. Happy lovers live in a magical city where you can fly on the clouds or decorate your dress with sun glare. But their serene and romantic world begins to crumble when a deadly nymphea flower settles in Chloe's lung. The plant sucks the life out of the girl, and Colin spends all his money on fresh flowers to heal his beloved.

Absurd, grotesque, phantasmagoria

This is the third screen version of Boris Vian's cult novel "Foam of the Days". In both previous versions, only the canvas was transferred to the screen - a love story, a magical, surreal world remained behind the scenes. To embody the writer's fantasies on the screen, it needed just such a devoted fan of Vian as Michel Gondry.

In the first part of the film, the viewer will have a fascinating immersion in a dream world with its idleness, gourmand and comfort. This is a fairy tale world, ready to fulfill cherished desires, a child world that does not want to grow up. You will want to stop and examine in detail almost every frame of the picture, but the kaleidoscope is spinning too fast. Transparent cars and decapod tanks are running along Parisian streets. Here the sun is shining and the storm is raging at the same time, the piano is preparing cocktails from music and drinks, and the chef serves food directly from the TV. It is not surprising if at first you have a desire to get into this magical world of fantasy and find yourself in the place of the heroes. But the second part of the picture does not evoke such a desire. The turning point is the heroine's illness. And this is not accidental - after all, it is love that makes a person extremely vulnerable to the forces of evil. Death can sneak up in the most delicate and beautiful way - like a snowflake that flew from a broken window and sprouted as a flower in Chloe's lung.

Only things change

Colin says the key phrase: "Things change, not people." Indeed: when a fatal disease invades the carefree life of lovers, this is reflected primarily not on the heroes, but on the surrounding reality.

We often describe our mood figuratively: “I'm sad, the colors have faded”, “it's hard, as if the ceiling has dropped,” “as if the walls are crushing,” “everything is crumbling”, etc. All such metaphors find their literal embodiment in the picture: first, the windows become cloudy, then they become moldy, bright colors fade, everything in the house breaks down. The walls pull in, the ceiling drops, and as a result the house collapses. This is the moment of the collapse of all hopes, the moment of the death of love.

You can not blame Gondry for some psychological schema of the characters. The characters in the book also receded into the background in front of vivid metaphors and paradoxical images. The plot itself is a banal story about a young maiden dying of tuberculosis in the arms of her beloved. The writer conveyed human experiences through the decorativeness of the surrounding world. The director also periodically "forgets" the main story, gets carried away, like a child in a toy store.

Shattered world

The deadly flower in the heroine's light is a metaphor of fate. Any idyll can be destroyed. Personal happiness is always opposed by society - the "world of adults" with its false values. Dream and reality collide in Foam of Days. Mechanical labor, the power of money and religion, the oppression of the army and the police - all these attributes of the external world destroy the inner world of the individual, leaving no chance for happiness.

The heroes try to isolate themselves from reality, but once they descend to the ground, they fall into the whirlpool of life, into the "foam of days" - and die.

The stylistics of contrasts, a mixture of fantasy and reality, comedy and tragedy, the psychological primitiveness of the characters and the sincerity of their experiences - this is the secret of the unique impression that this film makes.