You know you can trust a filmmaker to be an artist and not a slippery hack when he salts his Hollywood-comedy resume with documentaries about his own family. Of course we already knew Michel Gondry occupies an obsessive, handmade, dreamy moviescape all his own -- when he isn't directing The Green Hornet, that is. But his most recent film, The Thorn in the Heart, is personal in a brand new way. It's essentially a home movie, and as such is both very Gondrian and exactly what name directors aren't supposed to spend their time on, especially since the meat of Gondry's family isn't sensational or tragic or even terribly funny. Like all home movies, and to some mysterious extent all cinema, The Thorn in the Heart is about time, its unstoppable passage and the residue it leaves behind.
"We don't age, only our photos grow younger," somebody says early on, and we all know how he feels. Gondry's idea of a home movie differs from ours, of course -- one cousin is a lifelong model railroader, so the story Gondry tells is punctuated by table-top replicas of real locations and toy trains plowing through them. (Gondry also has family members reenact things he didn't get to film, and feels free to inject stop-motion animation into the stew.) His focus is the matriarch, his aunt Suzette, a somewhat prickly but congenial ex-school teacher, whose timeline takes up most of the 20th century and essentially runs through a series of rural schools. Gondry visits their ruins, one by one, even reconstructing a classroom movie theater in the woods and projecting the same Jean Gabin film Suzette remembered showing to her students.
Complicating the portrait is Suzette's grown ne'er-do-well son Jean-Yves, whose gayness and misfit persona presented Suzette with a lifetime of disappointment. But there's French history, too (Suzette remembers the mass relocation of Algerians into her district decades earlier, and meets one who's still there), and the ruckus Gondry's film crew has caused in the household, and Suzette's often poetic determination to remember everything accurately despite the fact that she's often wrong. An educator through and through, Suzette takes Gondry into a contemporary fourth-grade classroom, where her Q&A climaxes with the distribution of green-screen sweats, making the children (or portions of them) invisible to the camera. You need a sharper visual metaphor for the transience of youth? Of course, eventually Suzette et al. examine footage from the film they're in.
Gondry is as much a model-maker as his cousin, and family history becomes just another flexible, moldable object in his hands. What's most moving about The Thorn in the Heart is exactly what makes it barely marketable: Gondry's aunt, and the family and history that revolve around her, are not remarkable. They are perfectly ordinary, quirky yet sane, and that is oddly why they're worthy of the film's attention. We're all stars of our own movies, and done with a little originality and spark, each of our movies is worth seeing.