Backwards French Cars by Michel Gondry (Hooniverse Weird Week)

Yes, it’s Weird Week over here at Hooniverse. Even if I like to think of the ‘Verse as some sort of ideal dimension where cool cars are the norm and normal cars are blown out of the water, this amazingly strange concoction of back-asswards cars on a French film set just blew all our minds and seriously twisted our proportions of weirdness. That Weird French Car article from earlier today is nothing compared to this stuff (sorry!).

Michel Gondry, as some of you might know, is a wonderfully strange French film director who made his name creating dreamlike music videos (for Björk, Massive Attack, Foo Fighters, Radiohead – every big ’90s artist/band that can find artsiness within itself, so to say) and then moved onto weird films such as Be Kind Rewind and The Science of Sleep. Props made from scratch with childlike gusto are common in his films, and these frontwards-turned-backwards cars are a continuation on the wacky theme.

The greatest thing about these creations, as well as the super-intense colour choices, are that it’s not necessarily parts of the same car that help make the transition to something else. The parts can have come from absolutely anything, and it’s actually fun to scroll through the gallery and spot parts from something else completely. Opel Ascona parts on a Renault 19, a 605 front on an Espace’s ass, you get the picture.

Mechanically, most of the cars appear unchanged, but it’s sometimes difficult to tell which end is the original front end. Some of the cars (presumably the ones that get driven) have two sets of controls.

The prop cars will be featured in a 2013 film adaptation of Boris Vian’s 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream with Audrey Tautou of Amélie fame. Why that requires Euro cars done up in the style of “Picasso and MC Escher take over West Coast Customs” is anybody’s guess. Anybody read the book? Bueller? Bueller?

 

[Source: Blenheimgang.com]

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