Marc is a filmmaker full of ideas, hyperactive, choleric, and narcissistic. Due to a series of clashes with the producers of his latest film, he decides to steal all the footage he shot and finish editing it in total freedom at his aunt's house in the countryside outside Paris.

THE EMPIRE OF AN ARTIST'S MIND.

In the early video clips directed by Gondry, as well as in his films, the sets, the digital effects, the creation of original microcosms, and the surrealism that often materializes through the use of stop motion are the fundamental components of his cinema. They serve to fully delineate the personalities of the male characters. Shy and awkward men bordering on the pathological, characters that reflect Gondry's character in a compelling game between autobiography and fiction.

"THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS" is Gondry's most autobiographical work. In it is all of the director's creative urgency, the dreams and desires of a character who lives to create art in a roiling whirlwind of ideas, inventions and follies on the edge of the bearable.

The obsession with making art takes over Marc in a vital yet crushing process. Living to create, annihilating everything and everyone in the name of materializing one's fantasies, bending others to one's needs. The feverish and unbearable heaviness of being an artist.

Michel Gondry and consequently his protagonist introduce chaos theory into the making of their films, they experience filmmaking as an unpredictable act, where the linearity of storytelling and living undergoes constant landslides under the blows of the unknown and of making the unrealizable feasible (like Fellini and Lynch).

Buying a dilapidated farmhouse to use as a place to perform the film's editing, conducting an orchestra to compose the film's soundtrack but having no technical knowledge of music, editing a dialogue between three characters in which shots of one of them are missing...you learn by trying.

Gondry continues undaunted to make the same film again and again with a disruptive life force, his is an anarchic energy difficult to find in other French auteurs. Create or Die.

In some respects, "The Book of Solutions" is reminiscent of John Waters' "Death to Hollywood!" In Gondry's film, too, there is a free-for-all about filmmaking and a comparison of two worlds and two visions of filmmaking. On the one hand there are the producers for whom films must be as commercial products as possible accessible to all and sellable on the best terms, and on the other we find the directors and screenwriters stoically determined not to give in to commercial rules and to make their profession a reason for living.

Creativity is the ability to transcend the ordinary, it is thinking outside the box to find original solutions.

07-Nov-2023 by Ema