Review: Be Kind Rewind (4/5)

Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind is a loving allegory about the movies




Be Kind Rewind
(Michel Gondry):
Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz.
Running time: 101 minutes.


Who owns the movies? That question has been asked since audiences first popped their eyeballs, jumped their skins and fled their seats when the Lumiere brothers, in 1895, screened the arrival of a train at La Ciotat Station. The locomotive increased in size to the point that viewers thought it would bear down on them in their seats. And then, when it was over, the audience asked for more. Somewhere in that darkness, between the projector lens and the screen, was the melding of seemingly opposite elements – money making and the pleasures of art – that we now call the movies.
There is a scene in Michel Gondry’s very sweet new film, Be Kind Rewind, where Sigourney Weaver puts a mountain of home-made VHS films beneath a steamroller. She is a copyright infringement attorney working for the big studios. She wants to crush the efforts of Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def) who have been remaking classic films with a VHS video camera, no money and lots of imagination. This showdown is a key to Be Kind Rewind – a ludicrous, entertaining comedy that fizzes with Michel Gondry’s child-like eccentricity (The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). For it is also a loving allegory about the movies, and the way in which they first took seed. It tells us even more too about why we fall in love with them.
The title takes its name from a dilapidated video rental store, owned by Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover). Mr Fletcher is prickly and tired (so too is Danny Glover) and he has failed to move with the times: the DVD store around the corner has knocked his clunky VHS rentals out of business, and the local council has given him 60 days to renovate the premises or have it demolished. So he decides to take a “holiday”, when really he is setting up surveillance on the business model of the local DVD store. That leaves Mike (Mos Def – endearing) in charge, who has been warned by Mr Fletcher to keep local nutjob Jerry out. Jerry is played by the irrepressible Jack Black in what is now a variation of a theme (that theme being exuberance). And when Jack Black is on screen, nothing is going to stop him doing what he pleases, whether that be hanging out at the video store, or trying to sabotage the local power plant, which he believes is playing with their minds. The plan is bungled and Jerry becomes magnetised in the process. He becomes attached to metal objects, while his attachment to the video store sees him accidentally erasing all the VHS cassettes.
What few customers there are start complaining; Mia Farrow’s Miss Falewicz is going to grouse them to Mr Fletcher unless she gets Ghostbusters to rent. Come back later they tell her. The plan? To remake it from scratch over the wiped cassette. “I’m Bill Murray. You’re everybody else,” says Jerry. Their effort has the tinfoil and tinsel kitsch hilarity of an Ed Wood film. Rush Hour 2 gets the same treatment; Robocop is rendered out of spare car parts (a pneumatic fork lift provides sound effects). They soon have a cult industry on their hands. It’s a perfect environment for Gondry’s fascination with Blue Peter DIY and old-fashioned camera tricks. And at first it looks like he is going to indulge this to the point of slightness. But then you see it shaping into something else: Mike and Jerry’s enthusiasm and success captures the same rush that early movie makers went through.
There is a tender moment later that comes after their business is being shut down, and they have made an original work. The camera trains across the faces of a cinema audience, delight reflected in the dusty flickering light. And somehow, unpacked from that beam of light, comes a moment where the filmmakers stumble upon art. It reminds you what cinema is all about: how early audiences were transported to the moon by Georges Méliès in Le Voyage dans la Lune; or how a face like Lilian Gish’s could ensnare your heart.
Film companies have always sought to control films and formats, and thus control the money. Yet it is a losing battle. The titles and the rights all belong to the studios. But the feelings they evoke belong to the people. (And this is why piracy will never be stamped out.)
Movies bring our fantasies to life. There are our dreams, our terrors and our inspiration. The movies are ourselves. And you can’t own any of that. Be Kind Rewind shows us how the movies belong to the people.