He cuts this together with home movies and photos that show the Gondry family as they were back then, sometimes also peppering the narrative with news footage and even some whimsy. Gondry travels with his aunt to important landmarks from her past, and she shows him where she taught, where she lived, and what happened there. A school teacher who began instructing classrooms in the 1950s, she moved all over the mountains of France teaching children at out-of-the-way locales, many of them the offspring of Muslim immigrants and representing the first generation of their families that had the opportunity to get an education. The subject of The Thorn in the Heart is Suzette Gondry, by all accounts a remarkable woman. It's just now he's digging into his own memory, looking through his family history to examine a central figure that has fascinated him ever since he was a child. Its obsession with youth and memory also connects it back to the subjects of Gondry's fictional features. Gondry's latest film, the documentary The Thorn in the Heart, is a more quiet affair than Chappelle's shindig, but it's far more poignant.
The Block Party film he made with Dave Chappelle is one of the most lively concert films I've ever seen, one that has as strong an interest in the people who come to listen to the music as it does the music itself, and yet never feels like it's sacrificing one for the other. Yet to box him in as the maddest of hatters is to ignore how facile he is with reality, as well. Michel Gondry has a reputation for his bizarre, pixie-dusted imagery, earned with loopy feature films like Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
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