About three-quarters of the way through Michel Gondry’s brief, brimming, inspired and liberating new movie, the narrator pauses a tale involving hammock-stealing squirrels to ask, “Where can this story be going?” By this point in the deliriously straight-faced lunacy of Maya, Give Me a Title, the answer is clear: It can be going anywhere. And that’s a good thing.
Maya is Gondry’s daughter and his creative partner in a long-distance project that they shared for six years, beginning when she was 4, and now distilled into this effervescent hourlong feature. Communicating with Maya by phone and computer across many miles, the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director devised an inventive way to stay close: His little girl would be the concept person, called upon to concoct a title for a movie adventure in which she’d star, and Papa would, over the next two to six weeks, run with that idea, creating a stop-motion short for Maya to watch.
Maya, Give Me a Title
The Bottom Line
Pure whimsy.
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Generation Kplus)
Cast: Pierre Niney, Maya Gondry, Miriam Matejovsky, Steve Matejovsky, Anita Matejovsky
Director-screenwriter: Michel Gondry
1 hour 1 minute
For the big-screen version, the onscreen words originally read to Maya by her mother are delivered in energetic voiceover narration and character work by Pierre Niney (star of Gondry’s previous feature, The Book of Solutions). English subtitles are cleverly treated with easy-to-read graphic simplicity as an element of the overall design. The comic escapades are bolstered by Jean-Michel Bernard’s delectable score, plus ace selections by music supervisor Frédéric Junqua, lending a retro tinge of ’50s-’60s buoyancy and playful suspense.
To punctuate the selection of animated shorts, Gondry has added live-action intros by the vivacious Maya, addressing the camera in a room that starts out empty and gradually becomes fully outfitted with furniture and art and this and that — much as the shorts themselves grow ever more intricate in their physics-defying yet weirdly grounded logic, culminating in such epic exploits as “Maya in the Sea With a Bottle of Ketchup.” No spoilers here, but let’s just say that the French fries of Belgium play a key role in this saga of ecological near-disaster.
Gondry also provides, through Niney’s narration and onscreen demonstration, a concise explanation of the production process and the evolution of his self-taught stop-motion technique. Beginning with tableaus fabricated using construction paper, scissors and Scotch tape and then sped-up, via smartphone, into “moving” scenes, he graduates to a more sophisticated 12-frames-per-second setup, but without losing the hand-wrought quality of this paper world. The palette is vibrant yet subtle, favoring rich secondary rather than primary colors.
Characters include a cat named Doubidou, who saves Maya after she’s encased in a giant snowball. (Cats, the narrator informs us, save children every day, “but nobody talks about it.”) There are thieving cats, too — hold on to your sardines, mice and computer cables! — as well as a clock fish, a giant robot, and a plane that’s made from household items and given a key boost by birds. A solution meant to shrink cucumbers (where did you think those cornichons come from?) accidentally miniaturizes Maya and sends her down the drain and into the sewer. In another story’s glimpse beneath the city, she and her mother find Gondry himself pounding away at a subterranean drum kit. The latter sequence is part of a “documentary” about an earthquake, with Maya as a fearless photographer.
Whether she’s a photojournalist, an admiral at sea, a mermaid or a fake cop, there’s no overarching agenda other than what-if. The jokes never bend too far into meta territory, and the very basic movie-genre riffs never strain.
Gondry expands his eclectic filmography with this rejuvenating fantasia, revealing another facet of his creativity (and confessing a certain compulsion; when Maya declines to provide a title for a next short, his reaction is priceless). Taking the material beyond its original audience of one, the writer-director offers a delicious mélange of the surreal and the silly for all ages. Anything can happen here, and it’s best to just go with it, like Maya down the bathtub drain or up into the sky on her bird-plane.
