[Film Review] Be Kind Rewind

It was only during the final 15 minutes of Michel Gondry’s new movie, ‘Be Kind Rewind’, (starring Jack Black and Mos Def) that I really felt a connection with what Gondry had obviously set out to achieve. The words that came into my head as I left the cinema - awash with a sense of ‘movie baptism’ – were: ‘the end justifies the means’.

Gondry is one of the first directors to evolve from, and be influenced by, the ‘MTV generation’ of the late 1990s. This was an era where digital media - cable internet, plasma-screen televisions, pay-tv, highly realistic computer gaming consoles, reality television programs, etc - became ubiquitous. An era where immediate gratification became not only available, it became essential, to avoid viewers ‘switching off’. As a result of this, consumerism (more and more so without dollar payment) flourished, and the attention spans of many young people became increasingly reduced.

Gondry began his creative career making television commercials (including ‘Drugstore’, an ad for Levi 501s which is officially the most awarded commercial in history), as well as indie music videos for his French band “Oui Oui”. These videos caught the attention of Bjork, who then enlisted him to direct her own video clips. Work for Radiohead, The White Stripes, and Daft Punk soon followed. All of his videos had a very unique, quirky, and almost makeshift feel. Rather than using digital effects, Gondry prefers to create all sets himself, and uses cardboard cut-out props to represent various real-life elements. The end result is a semi-maniacal (… keeping the impatient youth interested?), and ultimately a very real and human aesthetic.

Moving from music videos to feature length films is not always a seamless transition, although it was Gondry, along with Spike Jonze (‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘Adaptation’) and David Fincher (‘Se7en’, ‘Fight Club’), who are credited as representing the first-wave of artists to do so successfully. Gondry’s first film, released in 2001, was the intelligent and highly entertaining ‘Human Nature’. With a screenplay by lauded writer Charlie Kaufman, and produced by Spike Jonze, ‘Human Nature’ is quite light in essence, but certainly has a deeper sub-text accompanying the quirky vision that Gondry employed for the screenplay.

Next up was ‘Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind’; another film penned by Charlie Kaufman, and without doubt, one of the best films of its release year. Gondry was now lauded, by fans and critics alike, as a bona fide director. The time had come for him to free himself of the parent-like creative relationship with the brilliant Charlie Kaufman, and he did this with his own original script in 2006 - the romantic fantasy drama ‘The Science Of Sleep’. This was the film in which Gondry was finally able to have full creative control over the direction of the visual effects.

So where to now for Gondry, an artist who has covered so much ground already in a relatively short time in the industry? The answer is this back to ‘grass-roots’ movie - ‘Be Kind Rewind’ - which he both wrote and directed. Working within a small budget, getting the most use out of basic props, favouring genuine camera trickery over digital cheating, and casting relatively inexperienced actors (rapper-cum-actor, Mos Def, and Melonie Diaz), it is almost like Gondry put aside any artistic ego and instead just focused on trying to put together a really honest and human movie. Take note of my use of words here – ‘movie’, not ‘film’. There is a level of elitism that tends to come with the term ‘film’, and ‘Be Kind Rewind’ is a world away from any such high-brow critiques. ‘Be Kind Rewind’ hasn’t got a very deep plot (two video shop clerks concoct a plan to re-enact all the videos in the shop after they accidentally erase all the originals), nor has it got any breathtaking performances (Mos Def, whilst cute, doesn’t come across as the confident and charismatic man that is on display in his hip hop music). It wasn’t until close to the end of the movie that I really warmed to it and understood that Gondry didn’t so much care about the individual parts of the movie, he had an overall vision for it. Without giving too much away – there really is a life-affirming final stanza that is worth experiencing – Gondry, with ‘Be Kind Rewind’, has gone back to grass-roots movie-making, and in the process, has created something which will not only leave audiences with a reinvigorated love of the cinema experience, it will leave them with a touching sense of community togetherness. Put simply, this could be (1988 classic Italian film) ‘Cinema Paradiso’ for 2008.


Be Kind Rewind was released in 2008, and is now available on DVD.