THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS (LE LIVRE DES SOLUTIONS) Luminaries

Oscar®-winning filmmaker Michel Gondry (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) returns to the big screen with this deliciously meta, hilariously self-aware – and semi-autobiographical – portrait of a DIY filmmaker wrestling with creative and personal demons to complete his latest film. When production executives threaten to bring in a new editor to slim down his four-hour opus, 30-something filmmaker Marc (Pierre Niney) steals the master tapes and holes up at his aunt’s house in rural France to finish the edit. There, he lets his imagination run wild, writing a manual for combatting creative inertia that allows him to do anything but complete the film. While his dedicated editor (Blanche Gardin) and assistant (Frankie Wallach) attempt to keep up with the endless demands – crafting an animated interlude about a fox, shooting a verité documentary about an ant, recording an improvised orchestral soundtrack, recruiting Sting – Gondry crafts a behind-the-scenes comedy for the ages, while also unpacking and skewering the creative process, poking fun at his own foibles and whimsical style, and ultimately paying tribute to the long-suffering collaborators of self-absorbed creative geniuses everywhere. –Abbie Algar