Glossed in Translation: Be Kind Rewind

“It comes back to what ‘Sweding’ is: even if your resources are really limited, you don’t let your limitations limitate you,” says Michel Gondry in his endearing French-limitated English, expressing both his love of the handmade and the raison d’être for his new comedy, Be Kind Rewind.

For the 44-year-old Gondry, whose Science of Sleep (2006) was shot entirely by handheld cameras, his fourth feature rings of unlimited resources from its first shot: a massive Cinemascope pan across the Manhattan skyline, then past a rushing highway, to the underside of an overpass, where Mike (Mos Def) and Jerry (Jack Black) graffiti an ad for the titular video store.

And Sweding, of course, is what ensues when Jerry accidentally magnetizes his body and erases the shop’s stock, forcing the somewhat dim-witted pair to record its own versions atop the blank tapes. “I’m Bill Murray, you’re everybody else,” Mike tells Jerry as they start Ghostbusters. Black and Mos Def pull the plots from their memories and skill up the special effects. Very special effects. It’s an elaborate plot to get to the veteran video director’s usual worlds within worlds.

When these worlds unfold, Mike and Jerry substitute pizzas for splattered blood in Boyz N the Hood and a green garbage bag for Ghostbusters’ slimer. In a brilliant perspective trick, characters dangle from a jungle gym over a floor map of a city grid to recreate a cliff-hanger from Rush Hour 2. Elsewhere, Gondry’s style is channeled into elaborate sight gags, like an intricate Jerry-rigged camouflage designed for the junkyard where he lives. Its locale—post-industrial Passaic, N.J.—is fascinating to Gondry.

“At times, America just seems like a vast suburb,” he admits. “I don’t say that with contempt, because I come from a suburb in France. In suburbs, you really feel the economy boom and contribute to society, and it’s sometimes at the edge of decay, whereas in cities, you have lots more parts that can hold the thing together. When you go into suburbs, you see the more direct effect of society on people.”

The effect in Be Kind is either a mass affliction of the sublingual awkwardness affecting Gael García Bernal’s Stéphane Miroux in Science of Sleep or acute stupidity. Gondry doesn’t explore the former too deeply, preferring jokes about Jerry’s tin-foil helmets to exposition. “It’s a country, not a verb,” one customer says, when the word “Sweded” first emerges from Black’s mouth. It is perhaps the film’s only moment of self-awareness.

“Somebody has to be in charge or have important control from the very beginning to the very end of the film if you want to keep the current going,” says Gondry, who, for the second time in as many features, penned the script himself. One control method Gondry employs is chaos, intentionally throwing an actor’s timing by, say, misplacing a prop.

“I do that because it’s a nice way to lose any type of schtick,” he says. “They must forget the process of acting, which I find so invasive in a lot of movies I watch. Even movies which get great recognition, and the actor gets rewarded, sometimes I feel they are not in the moment, because they are in so much control. Especially in American movies, actors have so much power that sometimes it feels as if they’re controlling the camera.”

Though one might expect Gondry to Swede his own picture into headspun abstractions, Be Kind is almost entirely feel-good. “I wanted it to be a little more classical filmmaking,” Gondry explains about his use of a tripod and semi-traditional narrative, two characteristics missing from his best-known titles. For fans of those movies, the meat of the matter is not Be Kind itself, but the 20-minute Sweded productions at its heart—allegedly coming to the Web by press time.

Gondry—who sometimes seems more comfortable unfolding small ideas in ads and videos—is made for snack culture, committed to experimenting with short subjects in a way few of his peers are. Though the form was exiled from the big screen decades ago, Gondry has found a broad range of outlets. Recently, those have included a clip for long-time collaborator Björk, a YouTube miniature of the director solving a Rubik’s Cube with his feet, and an elaborate $800,000 RAZR2 ad criticized by Motorola execs for being too artsy.

Perhaps another byproduct of being un-limitated, the ad set was an intricate artbox of dream associations, powered by pulleys and sliding panels, and it was—despite being literally commercial—perhaps the purest Gondry yet: a nightclub wall collapsing into a distant grid of shimmering city lights.

“I don’t think it would fit nicely with an advertising block with a Burger King ad,” groused one exec. “It’s far more sophisticated.”

In Los Angeles, back from shooting his part of a triptych about Tokyo in which his main character turns into a chair, Michel Gondry sighs.