Gondry’s got it
I looked in my crystal ball and saw that Michel Gondry is making a French movie. That’s a first. What’s the most American of our filmmakers (he’s always claimed he’s French but I know that Parisian accent is fake) doing making a movie across the pond? For one thing, he’s been able to cast France’s leading man Romain Duris (no, it’s not Guillaume Canet as you might have presumed), along with the Gauls’ answer to Natalie Portman, Audrey Tautou (Amelie). More to the point, however, is that the film is a book adaptation from a Boris Vian novel, called “L’écume des jours,” which in English roughly translates as “The seafoam of the days” (the official English title is “Froth on the daydream”). There’s a fantastic quality to this novel which might translate well in front of Gondry’s camera. In fact, in terms of literary adaptations Vian is probably tailor-made for Gondry. In “Froth,” Colin and Chloe meet and fall in love. They are wedded to each other, but, instead of bliss it is a frustrating illness which awaits. Chloe is afflicted with a rare illness: she has a water lily stuck in her lung. The only possible remedy is that she be surrounded with flowers. Colin, who is wealthy, spends his entire fortune on her flower treatment and, well, things go back from here.
Production is supposed to start sometimes in the Spring of 2012.