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August 25, 2006 > Arts & Entertainment > Director Gondry awakens spectacle, whimsy in Science of Sleep

Director Gondry awakens spectacle, whimsy in Science of Sleep

By Ann Wang | For the Thresher

Filmmakers who choose common storylines know they risk producing cliched work. The starting ingredients for The Science of Sleep are familiar: the unattainable girl next door, the dead-end job, romantic Paris and a few crazy dreams. As usual, director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) takes this straw fodder and spins it into gold.

The film’s greatest strengths are its eye-candy visuals and complex main characters. For most of the film, Gondry traps viewers in the head of protagonist Stephane Miroux (The Motorcycle Diaries’ Gael Garcia Bernal) — literally. References to Stephane’s altered perception of reality abound, and scenes frequently cut to a room with eyelids for curtains.

The film thrives on these surreal, detailed sets — and on ingenious animation, the likes of which Gondry has produced regularly in films, commercials and music videos for bands such as Bjork and the White Stripes. For The Science of Sleep, Gondry takes care to maintain a childlike, handmade crudeness in each animated scene: Cardboard cities and roughhewn stuffed animals trot and fly jerkily through the film’s cartoons. But viewers should not interpret the unsophisticated animation as carelessness. Rather, these storybook visuals underscore one of the film’s most prominent themes: childhood imagination and wonderment with life.

The daydreaming Stephane is fully ensnared in this wonderment, so much so that he fails to distinguish his real life from fantasy. He often sleepwalks or dozes in and out of waking dreams, which gets him into comic trouble at work and with his love interest Stephanie (21 Grams’ Charlotte Gainsbourg).

In a memorable scene, Stephane presents Stephanie with a set of 3D glasses. Bewildered, Stephanie asks, “Isn’t life already in 3D?” The dejected Stephane, lost in his dream world and hurt by Stephanie’s rejection of it, does not realize that Stephanie does love him and relate to him. The two are otherwise similar, but Stephanie struggles to cope with Stephane’s disengagement from the real world.

This is the first feature-length film that Gondry has directed solo, and the absence of Charlie Kaufman, his partner on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seemed foreboding. As usual, Gondry manufactures a pleasant surprise: The script is hilarious. Stephane puts on a Seinfeld-worthy series of linguistic confusions as he alternates between English, French and Spanish. The situations are often so discomfiting that viewers do not know whether to laugh at or with the daydreaming joker.

Bernal delights viewers with a quirky, impish awkwardness as he plays Stephane, a rare treat not seen in his more prominent roles as heroes, bad boys and womanizers. While Stephane may be improbably puerile and slightly insane, he is first and foremost human. When Stephanie rejects him for the first time, he pouts, “It’s not my fault that I have feelings,” and later says that she is “at once all the women who broke his heart.” As the frustrated Stephanie, Charlotte Gainsbourg pulls off her role effortlessly and immediately wins viewers’ sympathies.

The only downside to this film-reel gold is that those unfamiliar with Gondry’s work may be unsettled by the film’s the bizarre, disjointed nature. Even those who sat through all 400 minutes of the collection The Work of Director Michel Gondry will find enduring this film a visual and mental strain, and they may remain dazed in the theater as the credits roll. Somewhere between the cellophane streaming out of the faucet and the tufts of cotton that hang in the air as clouds, viewers realize that they also can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy.

That, of course, is Gondry’s intent. The film’s fantastical atmosphere is further maintained by a playful soundtrack. In one dream sequence, Stephane and his officemates do a cover of Lou Reed’s “If You Rescue Me” dressed up in furry cat suits. And even this is not the most outlandish image in the film.

A bittersweet stream of consciousness, The Science of Sleep reminds viewers just how unscientific and illogical love and dreams can be, especially when they are mixed together.

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