Did Michel Gondry do ‘Tenet’ 20 years before Nolan?
Opinion is very much split on Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, the mind-twisting action thriller released in 2020 that confounded and delighted in equal measures – one thing’s for sure, you certainly can’t accuse the British director of not trying to push new boundaries. But just how new they were might be up for debate when you examine a 1990s music video by Frenchman Michel Gondry.
Eight years before he united Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in the staggering Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry was brought on board to direct the promo for a song called ‘Sugar Water’ by New York trip-hop band Cibo Matto, resulting in one of the most inventive music videos in history.
Gondry was already well known in music circles, having won awards for his video for Björk’s single ‘Human Behaviour’ in 1993. For the Cibo Matto clip, he decided to try something outlandish – two complete videos, telling one story, one shot forwards and one shot backwards in reverse.
The result is a video you really need to watch three times, first both screens, then left, then right, to pick up all the little details and to understand what an impressive premise it is. The band and extras had to learn what to do and where to the second, with Gondry calling out precise direction, the result of actions on the left hand side needing to be mirrored on the right – a visual palindrome.
And that’s not far away from what Nolan was trying to do with Tenet many years later. It was a screenplay that took the director five years to write and plot out, a spy movie that existed in two realities, forwards and backwards, with the main protagonist played by John David Washington moving through both in order to foil a major terrorist attack.
The level of detail Nolan needed to go into is astonishing. Kenneth Branagh, for example, had to learn how to speak backwards in a Russian accent rather than simply having his lines reversed in post-production. But while Nolan is undoubtedly a genius, he is prone to employing scientific theories that are simply beyond the understanding of everyday people on the street, and Tenet suffered because of it.
Despite making a huge amount of money, it barely broke even at the box office due to the cost of producing the films. Critics were mixed in what they thought of it, as were audiences, some of whom thought it a self-indulgent confusing mess, despite the undeniable spectacle Nolan always brings to the big screen.
Gondry, meanwhile, had arguably an even bigger impact on movies than the music video in the same year when he directed a video for drinks brand Smirnoff and pioneered the ‘bullet time’ technique used so impressively three years later by the Wachowskis for The Matrix.
His first proper movie was 2001’s Human Nature, which did disastrously; a bizarre storyline about people trying to make a man brought up as chimpanzee more human didn’t help matters, but it was written by Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich fame, and it marked the first time he would work with Gondry.
The second was the romantic sci-fi drama Eternal Sunshine… an astonishing movie that did away with conventional narrative structure, pushed visual boundaries and embraced surrealism while making it universally accessible and enjoyable. It won Kaufman an Oscar for ‘Best Screenplay’ and stands as one of the finest pieces of cinema this century.
