Aptly named after the freewheeling Duke Ellington composition, Michel Gondry’s latest film Mood Indigo is an adaptation of Boris Vian’s cult magic-realist novel L’Écume des Jours or Froth on the Daydream. “The big problem here is that Vian belongs to everyone,” says Gondry, who co-wrote the experimental film’s script. “I had to take it detail by detail, inventing lots of objects and using my imagination like a kind of controlled chaos.” Cut from the same cloth as his much-lauded hits Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, the film—excerpted here in an exclusive clip—tells the tale of a doomed romance between Chloé and Colin (played by Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris) set in an off-kilter world where Jesus flies around in a rocket ship. Giddy set pieces involving stop-motion go-karts and mechanical clouds betray Gondry’s usual signature preference for homespun special effects over CGI. The surreal narrative of Mood Indigo flourishes as objects respond to the character’s behavior like a jazz ensemble: when grave illness strikes Chloé, her apartment starts to shrink and color film gives way to black-and-white melancholy. “I don’t see [people] age, but I see their photos growing youthful,” says Gondry, whose unfettered imagination saw him turn a bleach bottle into the Apollo space rocket as a child, and then apply the same idiosyncratic eye to music videos for acts such as Björk, White Stripes and, most recently, Metronomy.

Mood Indigo is in cinemas now.