If you can imagine a movie-maker who sustained a career while never leaving his teenage bedroom — putting each completed film outside the door on a breakfast tray for his mum to collect on her way down to the kitchen — then you can imagine the work of Michael Gondry.
His films have a wacky homemade aesthetic, a cheerful make-do-and-mend look, often introverted, bordering occasionally on something which is, to quote one character’s harshly non-PC remark in an earlier film, ‘kind of retarded”. He is a surrealist and a romantic and very French in his cerebral playfulness, though earlier collaborations with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have given him access to a Hollywood-indie sensibility.
His new movie, Be Kind Rewind, is probably his most uncomplicated and the least burdened by the need to explain or embed its eccentricity in melancholy. It is simpler and happier than his previous movies, The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it’s got some laughs, but also some baffling flaws.
Mos Def and Jack Black play Mike and Jerry, two guys who work, or at least hang out, at a crummy old video rental store called Be Kind Rewind, which is owned by gentle old-timer Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover). They do not stock anything as trendy or futuristic as DVDs: no, they rent out dusty old-style video cassettes at a dollar a pop to the similarly retrograde locals.
While Mr Fletcher is away for a week-long Fats Waller symposium, leaving the guys minding the store, something awful happens. Jerry’s whole body becomes electro-magnetised after breaking into the local power station on an eco-sabotage mission and by walking into the shop he erases every single tape.
So, armed with a chunky VHS camcorder, our heroes set out on a desperate mission to film their own no-budget version of the entire commercial Hollywood canon.
Pretty soon the homemade flicks get cult status; the transformation becomes known as ‘sweding” and ‘sweded” films are much prized. There is a sort-of serious point being made. In our world of super-rich super-celebs there is a vast gulf between the producers and consumers of the Hollywood product. Gondry’s movie wonders what would happen if this gulf were somehow narrowed, or abolished.
It’s funny and entertaining — but I have one quarrel with the film. Mike is supposedly alienated by the racial assumptions in the movie Driving Miss Daisy and, by implication perhaps, in all of Hollywood. No serious attempt is made to reclaim the film world for African-American culture, however, and in finally attempting a biopic of Fats Waller, it is notable that Be Kind Rewind appears to evade the issue by reaching out to the tradition of jazz, not cinema.
When Black’s Jerry suggests himself for the part of Waller and smirkingly parades himself around in blackface, everyone is embarrassed by how obviously inappropriate that is. Yet when he sticky-tapes his eyes back to play Jackie Chan for Rush Hour II, nobody minds that at all. So Chinese stereotypes are okay? Perhaps Gondry’s assumptions need to be rewound. —