Michel Gondry’s latest film “The Book of Solutions” somehow annoyed me more than expected. While this is another typically whimsical piece of work from Gondry, it is sometimes difficult to watch its rather obnoxious hero behaving like your typical narcissistic jerk throughout the film, I must confess that I tried to stop myself from shouting at this prick more than once during my viewing.

The movie is mainly about one young filmmaker’s desperate attempt to keep the artistic style and vision of his new film. When Marc (Pierry Niney) shows his rough cut to the people of the production company, they coldly respond to it for an understandable reason, and his producer willingly steps forward to taking care of their problem, but, of course, our filmmaker hero does not approve of that at all, though I think he has absolutely no idea on whatever he is going to do about his film.

Anyway, without any permission from the production company, Marc decides to take away all those stuffs shot by him and his crew, and his several key crew members gladly help him. Once they has all the materials in their car, they quickly get away from the production company, and then they go to some rural country where Marc’s old aunt Denise (Françoise Lebrun) resides. His aunt certainly welcomes him and his key crew members into her house, and they soon try to work on their project more while staying there for a while.

However, Marc does not seem to have any particular plan on what to do next. At first, he tries to shoot an extra scene in a very clumsy (and cheap) way. And then he talks a lot about how his movie should be edited in a very unconventional way. And then he tries to compose and record the score within a very short time. And then he also works on whatever he may do next after his current project is completed. As watching him constantly distracted by one impulsive thing to do after another, I was reminded of what my late mentor/friend Roger Ebert once said about James Joyce’s very elusive novel “Finnegans Wake”: “It is the stream of conscious of a man trying to write “Ulysses” and always running off to chase cats.”

I guess all these and other moments in the film are mainly for showing how Gondry’s preferred filmmaking method, and this demonstration sometimes works well enough to interest us. At one point, Marc modifies an old, abandoned truck into a makeshift editing room, and that looks rather amusing even though you may wonder whether it is actually practical or not. In case of the sequence where he tries to compose and then record the score for his film, he tries a lot of impromptu improvisation, but he somehow persuades a bunch of musicians to do whatever he wants, and then we get an unexpected moment of harmony and inspiration as they gladly go along with his very unconventional method.

However, I observed this supposedly creative process of his without much care mainly because it is evident from the beginning that Marc is your average egoistic asshole. So drunken with self-importance, he often mistreats his several key crew members without much thought or consideration, and his several key crew members, all of whom except one guy are incidentally female, have to tolerate him a lot just because they do care about whatever is being envisioned by him.

Around the midpoint, the movie comes to spin its wheels more than before as Marc continues to be willful and irresponsible as before, and you may become more uncomfortable with the depiction of his considerable mental illness in the film. As a guy who has depended much on medication due to occasional anxiety and depression, I was disturbed by how the movie regards medication as a negative influence on creativity, and I also did not like how it often makes an excuse from its hero’s increasingly problematic mental condition. I understand well that he frequently cannot help himself, but, folks, I also felt the growing urge to shake him up and then send him to any available medication and therapy as soon as possible.

Most of all, we still do not get to know that much about what and how the hell Marc’s movie is about. As far as I can see, it looks a bit too simple to work as a feature film, and the movie merely throws a little humorous moment of punchline when his eventually completed film comes to have an official premiere in front of many audiences.

The main cast members of the film try as much as they can do with their rather superficial roles. While Pierry Niney is often driven to numerous neurotic moments, Blanche Gardin, Françoise Lebrun, Frankie Wallach, and Camille Rutherford are stuck with a thankless job of functioning as a sensible counterpoint to Niney’s character, and you will probably be amused a little by the unexpected appearance of a certain famous musician in the middle of the film.

In conclusion, “The Book of Solution”, whose title incidentally comes from another impulsive stuff by its hero in the film, frustrates me with its supposedly free-flowing but ultimately pointless narrative, but I appreciate to some degree Gondry’s willingness to keep working as before. Although he has been less active for several years after his previous feature film “Mood Indigo” (2013), he shows here at least that he does not lose any of his own whimsical style, and I sincerely hope that I will be more intrigued and entertained by whatever may come next from him.