The Book of Solutions

When his backers threaten to wrest control of his new film away from him, director Marc Becker (Pierre Niney) steals the hard drives that store the existing footage and heads to the countryside. There, he holes up at the house of his aunt Denise (the legendary Françoise Lebrun) and strives to complete the feature with the help of his most loyal crew members, most notably his harried but devoted longtime editor (Blanche Gardin)—but finds his grip on the project slipping as he cycles from one manic idea to the next. Loosely drawing on his own experience making Mood Indigo (Rendez-Vous 2013), the ingenious director Michel Gondry’s first feature in eight years is characteristically imaginative and surprisingly heartfelt. Shooting in a house belonging to his own late aunt Suzanne (profiled in the 2009 documentary The Thorn in the Heart), Gondry delivers a memorably madcap portrait of a creative filmmaker struggling to find his way.