Critics reviews

Far more important to the film than these adventures is the chemistry between Daniel and Theo. Gondry wisely opts to portray each boy's sadness through his actions (Daniel's sleeplessness, Theo's desire to run away) rather than through episodes of anger or on-the-nose dialogue. These boys are all too real, and their final moment together is among the most quietly devastating in all of Gondry's oeuvre.

With its terrific, sweetly exuberant leads, and with Gondry's fabulous ease at evoking the lazy anarchic feel of bored teenage classrooms, Microbe & Gasoline is a charming, fascinatingly awkward oddity: too flip and sweet-natured to be obviously appealing to adult lovers of French art cinema, too digressive, melancholic, low-key and gently raunchy to classify as a children's movie in any usual sense.

The film moves at an unhurried pace, punctuated by candid moments distinct enough to seem completely personal (say, Daniel jerking off to one of his own drawings), sketching out a picture of early teenhood less focused on heartbreak and big dreams than on slow walks home after school with nothing to do.

The best of these moments hang in the back of your mind like fragments of a melancholy dream you can't recall in full. Gondry has always worn his heart on his sleeve, which remains endearing — especially when he shows that he still has a few more tricks left up it.

Gondry's most deeply felt film since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind... It's a film that shows Gondry's affinity with the playfulness and heart of early French New Wave. Though he's not acting the innovator of those heady days half a century ago (or as Gondry himself was a decade or more ago), he's created kindred artistic spirits with these two young actors that both relax and energize him.

The film's greatness derives less from the invention on show, and more for the moments of heartbreaking pathos regarding the pair's uncertain future and the realisation that their journey is perhaps a cry for help and a symbol of their loneliness. It resembles Joe Dante's wonderful Boy's Own adventure flick, The Explorers, and well as the classic comedies of Abbott and Costello. The final shot, too, is immense and heartbreaking, on a dime it recontexualises the entire film that came before.

As Microbe and Gasoline proceeds, and the boys' friendship is tested by a variety of factors, the film gathers a stark emotional force that has eluded Gondry since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It also boasts one of his most purely inspired moments as a filmmaker: a haunting final shot so breathtakingly brusque that it seems designed to squash those accusations of tweeness forever.

If I can no longer expect Gondry to try his best, even when reinventing himself as a low-key director, it seems strange to either hold him to the standards he set in the first phase of his career, or for that matter allow him leeway simply because of the goodwill he engendered through his best work... I, for one, welcome the new Michel Gondry because I'm willing to bet that if this is a reset button, what happens next will be better and attempting to recapture his spark was getting him nowhere.

Michel Gondry's Microbe and Gasoline is, first, a textural experience, an evocation of the prickly, confusing crawlspace between adolescence and adulthood through a fixation on the shape and surface of things. Its images abound in astonishingly tactile qualities and pointed associations on which the story's subtle epiphanies are built.

As in [Gondry's] other recent efforts, this one suffers from a lack of precision in the storytelling, and the contribution of a writer like Charlie Kaufman is sorely missed. But that doesn't stop Microbe & Gasoline from dishing out sufficient Gallic charms, in a film that feels like it was co-directed by Francois Truffaut and Terry Gilliam during his Monty Python days, offering up some clever visual gags amid lots of adolescent angst.