Blue & company, the big clogs of imaginary monsters (review)

The new film from the director of Without a Sound is a somnambulistic melodrama that fails to live up to its Pixarian models.

Can an author reinvent himself from his second film? With the cardboard Without a sound, John Krasinski had become, in the eyes of the industry at least, a filmmaker. After a Without a sound 2 not too bad in the genre – and released right for the reopening of cinemas post-Covid – he is already trying to reinvent himself, so for only his third film. We could even say: for his second film, so much Without a sound 2 was an effective repetition of the first. OK, let's resume, more simply: Blue & company, John Krasinski's second film, wants to explore a completely different cinema territory than his post-apocalyptic survival which has become a lucrative franchise. It's just an illusion, that said: by telling the story of a kid who sets out to rescue imaginary friends abandoned by their grown-up children, Blue & company isn't really interesting when it's on the verge of switching to a horror film (the line “we need new children”, pronounced by one of the Imaginary Friends, would not ring false in the mouth of Freddy Krueger). But it seems that he doesn't even realize it, that he is deceiving himself, and tells himself that it would be more lucrative to bet everything on the melodrama, however heavy it may be.

Multiplication of small background gimmicks (the comic Calvin and Hobbes with his imaginary stuffed tiger, the film Harvey and his imaginary giant rabbit) supposed to support the point, somnambulistic play by Ryan Reynolds, pathos on all levels (the imagination saves us, etc.) to the sound of a heady melody by Michael Giacchino. It is precisely at the level of music that is played out Blue & companywhose model is obviously the Pixar of the great era: in Up there, at the end of the famous five minutes of introduction (the sequence now called “A Married Life”, copied almost shot by shot in the intro of Blue & company), the slowing down of Giacchino's leitmotif seemed to indicate the end of the film, that a new story was beginning and that he would not be able to again reach the summit he had just climbed. In Vice versaduring the ice skating scene, the slowdown puts the Pixar studio face to face with the emotion that it creates and manipulates at will. Blue & company relies heavily on Giacchino's leitmotif, looped, stretched, slowed down, hammered until it no longer produces, or reinvents, anything.

Blue & Companyby and with John Krasinski, Ryan Reynolds, Cailey Fleming… Released May 8.