Movies - The Book of Solutions: Michel Gondry Reclaims His Creative Playground at the Cinémathèque Française

By Mulder, Paris, Cinémathèque, 18 june 2025

The evening of June 18, 2025, at the Cinémathèque Française felt more like an intimate homecoming than the grand opening of a retrospective. As audiences filled the iconic Parisian institution for the screening of The Book of Solutions (Le Livre des solutions), followed by a heartfelt discussion with Michel Gondry and Françoise Lebrun, there was a shared understanding that this wasn’t merely about revisiting a film—it was about rediscovering a visionary at peace with his peculiar, inspired chaos. This inaugural event marked the official kickoff of a sprawling homage to Michel Gondry’s eclectic and emotionally charged body of work, running through June 27, and the timing couldn’t be more symbolic. For a filmmaker who’s long blurred the lines between the imaginative and the autobiographical, The Book of Solutions serves as a mirror into his artistic rebirth—a journey deeply rooted in both personal reckoning and creative resilience.

The screening itself was electric, more than a year after the film’s release in France and two years since its Cannes premiere in the Directors' Fortnight. What’s remarkable about The Book of Solutions is not only that it represents Michel Gondry’s return to feature filmmaking after nearly a decade, but that it does so with such vulnerability and wit. Loosely inspired by the behind-the-scenes chaos of his 2013 film Mood Indigo, this 2023 comedy-drama follows Marc, played with neurotic brilliance by Pierre Niney, as he retreats to the Cévennes countryside with his crew to finish a film gone awry. Surrounded by his eccentric collaborators and guided by his aunt Denise, played gracefully by Françoise Lebrun, Marc’s spiraling creative process births the titular Book of Solutions—a fictional guidebook filled with curious yet oddly sound advice for surviving both art and life. During the post-screening talk, Michel Gondry openly shared how the film’s protagonist reflects his own past obsessions, anxieties, and his compulsive need to control every inch of a project. His honesty, balanced with his trademark humor, made for an uncommonly candid exchange with the audience.

The emotional resonance of that night was heightened by the backdrop of the Cinémathèque, a place Michel Gondry has often described as his spiritual home. The retrospective, which spans his entire career—from his music video days with Björk and The White Stripes to his Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—feels less like a chronological tribute and more like a map of his inner world. Each screening and event was meticulously selected to highlight not only the evolution of his visual language but the emotional through-lines of his work: childhood memory, dream logic, and the catharsis of invention. As the official program rightly puts it, Gondry is “a spiritual cousin to Georges Méliès,” and nowhere is this clearer than in The Book of Solutions, where surreal gags coexist with melancholic truth, and every handmade object seems to whisper a fragment of autobiography.

The film’s production history only deepens its connection to Gondry’s legacy. Shot in June 2022 across the Gard region, including Le Vigan and Saint-Sauveur-Camprieu, the shoot mirrored the film’s storyline, placing cast and crew in pastoral isolation. According to the press notes, Gondry had first met Pierre Niney in 2012, when the young actor asked him to be his “godfather” at a pre-César party—a small anecdote that takes on poetic weight considering the mentorship themes woven into the film. Produced by longtime collaborator Georges Bermann through Partizan Films, and laced with the whimsical yet stirring score by Étienne Charry, The Book of Solutions was clearly a labor of love. The film received generally favorable reviews—an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an average of 3.8/5 on AlloCiné—but its true impact lies beyond numbers. As a self-portrait disguised as fiction, it’s a reminder that even chaos can have a method when filtered through Gondry’s compassionate lens.

As the June 18 evening closed with applause and laughter—some of it from Michel Gondry himself—it was clear that the retrospective would be less about nostalgia and more about regeneration. The events that followed, including the Microbe et Gasoil screening with actors Ange Dargent and Théophile Baquet, and the much-anticipated Michel Gondry by Michel Gondry masterclass with scholar Gabrielle Sébire, only deepened this impression. Each encounter allowed audiences not just to consume Gondry’s work but to inhabit it—to see the strings, the glue, the imperfections, and to celebrate them as central to the art itself.

What the Cinémathèque Française has done with this tribute is nothing short of extraordinary. In an age of digital polish and algorithmic storytelling, it offers a heartfelt reminder that cinema is at its most powerful when it is handmade, idiosyncratic, and rooted in emotion. The Book of Solutions, in this context, becomes more than a film—it is a manifesto for reclaiming creativity on one’s own terms. And for Michel Gondry, it’s also a full-circle moment: returning to the place where his love for cinema was shaped, not as a master seeking accolades, but as a curious dreamer still scribbling solutions into the margins of his mind.

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Synopsis : 
Marc flees with his entire team to a small village in the Cévennes to finish his film at his aunt Denise's house. Once there, his creativity manifests itself in a million ideas that plunge him into a strange chaos. Marc then embarks on writing the Book of Solutions, a guide full of practical advice that could well be the solution to all his problems...

The Book of Solutions
Written and directed by Michel Gondry
Produced by Georges Bermann
Starring  Pierre Niney, Blanche Gardin, Françoise Lebrun, Frankie Wallach,,Camille Rutherford, Vincent Elbaz
Cinematography : Laurent Brunet
Edited by Élise Fievet
Music by Étienne Charry
Production company : Partizan Films
Distributed by The Jokers (France)
Release dates : 21 May 2023 (Cannes), 13 September 2023 (France)
Running time : 102 minutes

Photos and video : Boris Colletier / Mulderville