Michel Gondry
Human Nature

Brilliant first work by Michel Gondry, a director mainly appreciated for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004) and the prolific production as a music video maker (in fact, this film here seems to have several references to Bjork's "Human Behavior" video), but also successful in directing works different from his "standard" genre, such as the comedy "Be Kind Rewind" or the amusing "The Green Hornet," showing his ability to set up his vast and interesting repertoire of imagination and his typical abstract and dreamlike characterization, a characteristic dimension of his works. There is no doubt, however, that "Human Nature" (the screenplay is by the always brilliant Charlie Kaufman, here also a producer along with Spike Jonze) is an over-the-top and unique film that is also somehow amusing due to its surreal and deliberately ironic character, though always in a subtle and intelligent way rather than crude, rich in cues for interpretation and implications of a psychological and social nature. Well, let's say it right away; frankly, trying to find meaning in an animalistic direction or pushing the usual return-to-nature cause would be as wrong as hitting the post with an empty goal. Without any malice or cynicism, on the contrary, Gondry is rightly ironic about this aspect and its more extreme manifestations and, in any case, the film rather than strictly concerning nature understood as a physical space and something alien to the individual, questions the real "nature" of man on the social plane and how this - society - functions according to rules that constitute a constraint due to consolidated mindsets and particularly to conditioning that each individual is reluctantly compelled and subjected to by the surrounding world, especially and more incisively in childhood years. Nothing new. Everything even banal, as one of the secondary characters in the film would observe, but recurrent, a psychotherapist who merely considers his patient's assertions absolutely banal and simply logical, without any particularly brilliant cue. But the content development in "Human Nature" is instead at least original and goes beyond typical considerations even introducing evident parodies of science fiction cinema which inevitably recall the classic "Planet Of The Apes," an eternal source of inspiration to draw from for ages as a great and universal work in film history.

The protagonists of the story are three original and unique characters who directly recount in three completely different circumstances the events depicted in the film. Our heroine, the "good" character, is a woman named Lila, played by a very talented Patricia Arquette. She is a young woman who retreats to live in the forest because of a congenital problem, a hormonal defect causing continuous hair growth all over her body. In the meantime, she becomes a writer appreciated as a fervent supporter of the feminist cause; then at one point, desiring male company (practically "horny," as Michel Gondry unabashedly explains), decides to return to live in the city. Here, she has a relationship with Dr. Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins). Insecure and obsessive, raised in an oppressive and almost paranoid family environment, he conducts studies on mice, insisting on attempting to teach them etiquette and how to use a knife and fork, with the aim of proving that any subject, if "trained," can become a "model" citizen, exemplary. When they encounter Puff (Rhys Ifans), a man who has lived his entire life believing he is a monkey, he becomes the subject of Dr. Bronfman's experiments, seeking to make him his masterpiece by re-educating him according to contemporary society's consolidated schemes and a definitive proof of his science.

Gondry does not so much contrast two societal models; in truth, the only dichotomy is between man and ape, and the superiority of the endearing chimps and the like is justifiably used only in an ironic and paradigmatic way to express dissent towards human behaviors that are still conditioned by uncivilization and barbarity (the character of Puff's father, emblematic, chooses to be a monkey, poisoned by the evils of the society surrounding him and definitively maddened after Kennedy's assassination). In truth, therefore, he is more interested in the workings and choices of human nature, even in its seemingly less radical expressions, and how, in general, our rigidity and narrow-mindedness prevent us from living our lives freely, without considering the perpetual contrast between reason and instinct, where the former at some point becomes more than a quality, a sort of trap with which one vainly attempts to justify and explain the impossible. Gondry creates a film that is intelligent, parodic, and entertaining rather than suggestive or grotesque, also highlighting a certain dramatic component, which perhaps is strongly expressed by the seemingly more negative character in the story, but that ultimately most depicts this state of suffering, and who would then be Dr. Bronfman. The contrast between his apparently favorable social position, the various accolades received, the persistent courtship of his assistant Gabrielle (Miranda Otto), and his obsessions, his blocks, his obsessive studies, and his inability to love and accept others, primarily his partner Lila and himself, constitute tragic and unresolved themes, delving into a subconscious established for millennia, perhaps before homo was definitively (?) "sapiens."