Science of Sleep

"The Science of Sleep"
Written and Directed by Michel Gondry

I was very excited, yesterday, to have the opportunity to see the new film from Michel Gondry of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" fame. I was hoping for another surreal psychological adventure and I was not in the least bit disappointed.

"The Science of Sleep" is the tale of a young man, Stephan, played ably by Gael Garcia Bernal, who has trouble distinguishing between his dreams and reality. The film in fact opens with Stephan dreaming of himself as the host of a tv program in which he explains to his imagined viewers how dreams are made. He fills a large pot with various ingredients such as 'random thoughts' and 'reminiscences of the day' which look to us like a tube of paint and spaghetti. This transitions to him returning to his childhood home in Paris after the death of his father from cancer, whom he had been living with in Mexico. This juxtaposition of fantasy and reality becomes the basis for the movie.

Stephan fancies himself an artist but his crowning achievement is a series of colorful drawings for a calendar in which each month features a rendering of its most famous disaster. Stephan ends up working as a copy boy for a promotional calendar company with 3 other confrontational coworkers. Stephan encounters a love interest in his next store neighbor, Stephanie, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. She is also an amateur artist who sews little figures from felt and cloth. Her big idea is to put a felt boat in a felt forest so that the boat is 'searching for its mer', with mer/mere being a french play on the words for sea and mother.

"The Science of Sleep" is funnier than "Eternal Sunshine" and the comedy comes in three varieties: there is the intra-office banter and pranking at the calendar company, Stephan's own social awkardness and at time vulgar contributions to conversation, and then of course you have the surreal nature of his dream world. One memorable scene of the latter is when Stephan gets bogged down at work in his dream and suddenly realizes he has hands as big as the rest of his body. He proceeds to flog his colleagues with his giant hands with a very comic result.

Gondry's film is also, at times, thouroughly confusing and disorienting. Those who were confused by "Eternal Sunshine" will be even more lost watching "The Science of Sleep." Just as Stephan inverts dream and reality, there are some scenes in the movie in which the viewer can not clearly tell whether it is a dream or reality. One such scene features Stephan being honored for his calendar idea by his boss. The ceremony and ensuing party do not feature some of the fantastical elements of Stephan's dreams but are at the same time incongruous with the previously established character of the boss. After thinking a lot about this film, I believe that this kind of confusion is intentional on Gondry's part. I think that he wanted the audience to feel the same uneasy kind of disorienting feelings that the principal character has. The end of the film, and this is not a spoiler, is also uncertain. My friend Becky noted, "I don't know whether that was a happy or sad ending."

The cinematography and art direction in this film are also fantastic. The reality sets beautifully render the cramped quarters of a Parisian flat and the clutter that comes along with living life. The fantasy sets show a great deal of imagination and child-like dreamscape that comes to life on the screen. The cast, all relatively unknown in the US, also work toghether very well. They also, with the possible exception of Stephan and minor character Zoe, are not very conventionally attractive. I think this really lends to the realism side of the film. Life is not full of Venus and Adonis look-alikes. Furthermore, Gael Garcia Bernal's portrayal of Stephan is more multidimensional than Jim Carrey's overly mopey Joel in "Eternal Sunshine." Bernal is at times mopey but also vital and even manic. Bernal fully displays the emotional journey of a character with such bizarre circumstances.

In short, I have not been this visually and mentally stimulated by a film in a while. "The Science of Sleep" is as conceptually clever and even more beautifully assembled as "Eternal Sunshine." Gondry draws you in and makes you experience Stephan's odyssey along with his characters. "The Science of Sleep" is no sophomore slump for this talented and imaginative director. I give Gondry's "Science of Sleep" $20.