Rube Goldberg contraptions are everywhere. Colin has invented a device that produces cocktails based on musical compositions. An announcer at an ice rink is a stiff-looking human-sized bird, like a huge version of what you'd see popping out of a cuckoo clock. This world is studded with marginal surreal touches that are never heralded or explained. People's legs and torsos flex and twist like bendable action figures or pieces of chewing gum stretched out these effects are done, it appears, with dummies on strings. The movie is adapted from the 1946 novel "Lecume des Jours" ("The Froth of Days") by Boris Vian, a source that has been described as a class-consciousness parable about rich people living in a Garden of Eden built from their money and then gradually being forced out of it. Colin and his best friend Chick (Gad Emaleh), Chick's loyal girlfriend Alise (Aissa Maiga), Colin's great love Chloé and all of their pals exist in a universe that seems to have the same internal logic as a Max Fleischer cartoon made in about 1938 or so: think Betty Boop or Popeye. The result is a film that seems to be subtly insisting that everything is not fine, even as the director's tone is saying, "It's all sunshine and lollipops, folks love is grand, life is but a dream-and look, here's another visual miracle!" The movie can't or won't reconcile the critical aspects of the story (whatever they may be) with the filmmaker's desire to delight us. The problem is that the images are yoked to a story that seems to have been meant as cutting satire-on what, though? Maybe it's a comment on the disconnect between the upper classes and everybody else, though from what's onscreen it's hard to tell.
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