Near the end of Michel Gondry's remarkable, delightful comedy Be Kind, Rewind, we see the unglamorous, mixed-race, multi-generational, essentially ordinary small-town audience gathered in the cramped space of the corner video and thrift store belonging to Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover) as they watch the amateur movie we've seen them make, a no-budget biopic about Fats Waller shot on VHS. The camera pans tenderly over them in the darkness, with backing melancholy jazz piano, allowing us to see them - street kids, teenage roughs, housewives, pensioners, blue-collar workers, the men and women of Passaic, New Jersey – as an idealised form of every cinema audience. They're happy as they laugh, and even as they cry over Fats's death. We dwell for a moment on each face – black, white, young, old, poor – and see their common humanity. It's extraordinarily affecting, if you've been in sympathy with the film, a democratic celebration of the power of cinema to touch and unite people.
The film's jingling title comes from the homely injunction that used to be standard in the days before DVD in "1 Video 1 Day 1 Dollar" stores like Mr Fletcher's. But Be Kind, Rewind also implies something larger – a retrospective movement in the movie as a whole, and an association of the past with a "kinder" social ethic. Gondry is fully aware that VHS is a quasi-defunct medium, already the subject of technological nostalgia, and that setting his film and Mr Fletcher's video shop in the present in itself challenges our credulity. His film, in its sympathy with those sidelined by corporate progress, is on the side of the victims and underdogs. Emblematically, the ancient building the shop occupies is condemned for demolition by the modernising city council. Passaic – where the film was shot, involving the local community – is a casualty of economic and social history (a multi-factory fire and general unemployment). Jerry (Jack Black) laments "the whole town is a swamp" and that "the only reason people are here is they've no place else to go". That despair is the subject and the foundation of the film.
The rewinding in question in the movie is of course chiefly a rewinding in cinema history, of a populist kind (Ghostbusters, Robocop, Driving Miss Daisy – all recreated in bargain-basement 20-minute versions with cardboard and gung-ho enthusiasm). That late scene where we watch the audience magically transformed seems to be a conscious echo of the famous scene in Preston Sturges' strange masterpiece Sullivan's Travels (1941), a comedy which pushes past the safe edge of the genre to flirt with tragedy.
Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a successful Hollywood director of escapist fluff (eg Ants in Your Pants of 1939) who now wants to make a serious film called Brother Where Art Thou? (inspiration for the Coens) and goes on the road in search of American reality – only to suffer a series of Candide-like misadventures and end up as a convict in a chain-gang. In the depths of his misery, the prisoners are led in chains to a service by a black preacher, followed by a silent screening of a Mickey Mouse cartoon – at which the hard men around Sullivan weep with simple laughter. Sullivan himself, first puzzled, finds himself laughing too. By the time the film ends – with a self-conscious, quasi-Brechtian "happy" twist – Sullivan has learned his lesson, and wants to make a comedy: "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. That's all some people have."
The feeling for the experience of ordinary people – which informs Be Kind, Rewind, as, perhaps, a new Depression looms – is the stuff of much of the 1930s American cinema which Sullivan's Travels seems to be crystallising, in particular that of Frank Capra. Before he arrived at the suicidal despair over the constrictions of small town existence in his masterpiece It's A Wonderful Life (1946), Capra and his screenwriter Robert Riskin had tried to dramatise the possibility of small-scale individual opposition to the trusts, monopolies and corporations, the bureaucracies and regulations, which threatened to crush the spirit of independence in American life at large. The carefully gauged whimsy of Be Kind, Rewind recalls that of Capra's turbulent 1938 comedy You Can't Take It With You, starring James Stewart and Jean Arthur – a quasi-screwball fable in which one eccentric miscellaneous household holds out against the corporation that owns the 12 surrounding blocks and wants to buy it up.
Capra's fascinating film is too explicit in its debates about politics and society, and too heavy-handed in its comedy to convince. Still, its spirit of resistance and solidarity retains considerable appeal. The hero, old Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), is said to have "found what everybody's looking for", the courage that's needed "to do what we want to do" in a world where inauthenticity and unhappiness are the norm. It's all right, that film says, not to be rich or famous or powerful, provided you can feel your life is worthwhile. And Gondry's story of glorified home movies, in which normally disempowered people are given parts to play, so "they'll see themselves as part of the neighbourhood", seems to be saying, in a brave, cool way of its own, something very similar. The closing song declares that "Our town is better than you thought". Upbeat, yes – but not dewy-eyed. It's not clear at the end that Mr Fletcher's store has really been saved, just as it's not clear at the end of It's a Wonderful Life how much has really changed in the small-minded, oppressive little town that we've seen spoiling so many lives.