Michel Gondry: Do it Yourself!

François Nemeta's personal documentary about his friend and mentor Michel Gondry is a very ordinary biographical documentary about a most unusual director. In chronicling the life and career of the man behind iconic music videos by Björk, Beck, Daft Punk, Kylie Minogue, and The White Stripes, and the director of films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep, and Be Kind Rewind, Nemeta doesn't attempt to mimic Gondry's unique, handcrafted aesthetic as an approach to this portrait. That's a good thing, as documentaries about artists that attempt to capture something about their subject by appropriating the most surface aspects of their work are pretty insufferable. But Nemeta's mostly chronological telling of Gondry's story, while it provides a number of interesting details about how each piece of work was created, doesn't give much insight into the artist or the scene that birthed him.

Watching Michel Gondry: Do it Yourself! I couldn't help but think about Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), Anton Corbijn's 2023 documentary about the creative team who designed most of the iconic album covers of the 1970s and '80s. The way Gondry transformed the slick TV advertising aesthetics of music videos into something vastly more handmade and artistic is a similar story to how Hipgnosis transformed the standard album cover into an art form. But watching Corbijn's movie, we come away not only with a deep understanding of his creative subjects but also the art and music scene in England that shaped and fostered their work. The closest equivalent in Nemeta's picture is a mention that Gondry went to art school at a time when the defining cultural force in France was punk rock. OK, but can we get a little more context? Did a punk attitude contribute to Gondry's art or to the way he pursued his art? Later in the film, where we hear people discussing the movie The Science of Sleep, we hear how much the character played by Gael García Bernal mirrored Gondry, but nothing we've been shown up to that point explains how he is like this character. Of course, it's really great seeing the clips from Gondry's early work and the music videos on which he built his name, but all this doc really succeeds in doing is making you want to go home and watch those videos in their entirety.