Solutions Book review: When did the talented Michel Gondry become the world's most boring filmmaker?

If you've ever wondered when it was Michel Gondry, the talented French director of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", became the world's most boring filmmaker, you could say the answer is, "He always was. Yet no one, including me, really thinks of him that way. C is because the few works by him that have risen to prominence possess a special combination of ease and charm. I love "Eternal Sunshine", a virtuoso film that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time You could just choose to characterize it as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's masterpiece, but the truth is that Gondry made it - the time-hopping, emotionally convulsive performances from Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet - with a masterful sense of play and gravitational control.

I've always heard that the script originally provided by Kaufman was twice as complicated, and that 'it was Gondry who had the wisdom to work with him to prune it. In 2004, when "Eternal Sunshine" was released, it was only Gondry's second feature film as a director, and it seemed, from then on, he could do anything. What it did, instead, was implode in a confetti explosion of absurd featherweight weirdness.

"The Book of Solutions", which premiered last month at the Cannes Film Festival, is Gondry's first feature film in eight years, and it may well be the worst film he's ever made. Yet, like his other failures, he is marked by a kind of mischievous and hermetic self-esteem. Gondry never lost his craft as a filmmaker (he was the director who, in the days of music video and TV commercials, invented bullet-time three years before "The Matrix"), and "The Book of Solutions" releases its story with the same flaky, funny Teflon confidence that has marked Gondry comedies as heavy with their own quirkiness as the muddled video store reverie "Be Kind Rewind" (2008), the surreal romantic tragedy" Mood Indigo" (2013), the drama of two children on a road trip through France "Microbe et l'essence" (2015), or the film that marked the end of his career in American studios, his reinvention really terrible 2011's "The Green Hornet" (remember? Seth Rogan played the Green Hornet, which turned out to be a big "no").

Because "Eternal Sunshine" is such a great and deservedly famous film, and because Gondry was a true music video wizard (which is why he's worked with everyone from Björk to the White Stripes to Lenny Kravitz to Belinda Carlisle, Donald Fagen, Sinéad O'Connor, Malcolm McLaren, the Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, Sheryl Crowe and Radiohead), these accomplishments eclipsed what turns out to be the essential Gondry aesthetic. The rest of his movies are crockpot pans of scaled-out fantasy, retro nostalgia, and more scaled-out fantasy. They tend to feature dreamers who are also losers, tech contraptions that have a rickety DIY quality, all covered in…more fantasy.

What puts "The Book of Solutions" in its own special Gondry dud category is that the movie is about a director, the one who makes a movie that looks so hazy and precious that it's as if the movie we're watching is trying to elevate the fantasy of Gondry to a new level of meta annoyance. In the opening scene, director Marc (Pierre Niney), a bearded legend of the 1930s, meets the directors of the independent studio which finances his latest project. The film he is making lasts 4 hours and 7 minutes, but he already knows that it is a masterpiece. He assaults everyone there with his obnoxious ideas for it, to the point that when the studio suit in charge shoots him down, we can't help but side with the suit. Marc, overwhelmed by the answer, goes out for a cigarette - except he doesn't smoke. He really rushes to the editing room so he can steal the film, along with the editing equipment, and prevent the studio from ruining his "vision".

Gondry spins it all off with an acerbic satirical touch that seems, for a time, to leave the film open to the possibility that he is making fun of his hero. Except Gondry never really sticks with anyone else's point of view; he loves Marc too much to skewer him. Marc and his editor, Charlotte (Blanche Gardin), ...