The Book of Solutions review – a showcase of unbridled inventiveness

Directing a film requires creativity, but also practicality. Marc (Pierre Niney) has plenty of the former, but struggles with the latter, and at the beginning of Michel Gondry’s The Book of Solutions, his producers want to take his film away from him to try and make something watchable out of the footage he recorded. Offended but determined, Marc claims to go for a smoke and escapes with his editor and all the necessary equipment to go and finish the film at his aunt’s place in the countryside. The tone of the film is set: we are definitely in Gondryland, where any of life’s problems is faced with a drastic solution and fantasy can be more powerful than logic.

Marc is a thinly veiled stand-in for Gondry himself, who with this film is reckoning with some of his darker traits as an artist and a person. While Marc’s motivation to get his film made the way he wants it is laudable, it is also extremely impractical and frustrating for his collaborators. He changes his mind a lot, wants the seemingly impossible (for instance, to get Sting to contribute to the film’s score) and sometimes gets angry and borderline abusive with his crew, screaming absurd insults at them in moments that remain amusing but which Gondry doesn’t sugarcoat.

What makes Marc particularly impossible to deal with, however, is his approach to his work. Rather than following a classic production schedule and order of proceedings, he always wants to adopt an unusual angle. Editing a film starting at the beginning means you don’t spend as much time with the ending, so why not put the footage together in reverse? Such vaguely justifiable reasonings don’t come out of nowhere, however: Marc is dealing with a debilitating amount of self-doubt and is only buying time. He gets sidetracked by other projects that he argues help contribute to his general process, such as returning to the writing of a book he started (with only the title) as a kid: the titular Book of Solutions, in which he plans to offer simple solutions to nothing less than all of life’s problems. We’re not too far from the conceit of Gondry’s most revered film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – the ultimate solution there being forgetting the past entirely.

If Marc sounds insufferable, Pierre Niney’s dynamic yet precise performance makes him surprisingly compelling and his choices almost understandable. A very physical performer, Niney captures the energy that courses through Gondry’s mind, at once a creative and a destructive force, and his delivery and impeccable comic timing bring back to life Gondry’s inimitable existential slapstick. “You’re going to interpret my body,” he explains to a small orchestra he’s hired to create his film’s score, and starts jumping around, moving different limbs in different ways to illustrate what kind of sound he’s hoping for. And it works!

Devolving into a more or less coherent series of absurd scenes as Marc’s deadline to deliver his film approaches, The Book of Solutions is better enjoyed for its unbridled inventiveness than its commentary on filmmaking at large, as well as for Gondry’s idiosyncrasies, back in full force.

The Book of Solutions was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2023. A UK release date is yet to be announced.