‘The Science of Sleep’

Writer/director Michel Gondry proves he is his own man with this wildly imaginative, bittersweet love story.

By: Bob Brown
   As a boy in France, writer/ director Michel Gondry wanted to be an inventor. He later went on to art school and dabbled in rock music, which led him to music video-making and a run of music videos for the Icelandic pop star Bjork. There followed a very successful series of TV videos for commercial clients such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Air France, Levi’s and many others.
   His collaborations with other screenwriters, especially Charlie Kaufman (Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) have established Gondry as a director with a unique, offbeat sense of style. The Science of Sleep, Gondry’s first feature-length solo effort, will further cement that reputation.
   Gondry is somewhat the autobiographer in this film, about the hyper-imaginative Stéphane (Gael García Bernal). After his mother, Christine (Miou-Miou), and father broke up, Stéphane went to live with his father in Mexico (it’s no stretch for Bernal to play this role, since he is a prominent Mexican actor who moved to New York City to further his own career).
   But after Stéphane’s father died of cancer, Christine lured her son back to Paris with the promise of a challenging graphics job. It turns out to be the boring task of setting type into calendar layouts. Talk about autobiographical — that was a job Gondry himself slogged through before he turned to filmmaking. (The film is even shot in the same apartment where Gondry lived in Paris’ 18th arrondisement.)
   In an act of artistic rebellion, Stéphane presents his own calendar ideas to the boss, who is skeptical. The monthly themes Stéphane paints (crudely) are prominent disasters: airplane bombings, war casualties, a cornucopia of carnage to memorialize the continual sufferings of others.
   Otherwise, Stéphane is a shy, socially awkward young man who has trouble connecting with those around him. Emblematic of his precarious balance is his ineptitude with languages. (Gondry states in production notes to this film that he relished the idea of having creative control for a change, because he did not have to explain things. "When I work with other people, I have to use words," he remarked. "It’s more limiting to the process to have to convey my ideas that way.") Naturally then, Stéphane communicates with inventions and cardboard constructions.
   No one in Paris speaks Spanish and Stéphane often resorts to English or pidgin French. But his stumblings in everyday life are conquered in his vivid dream life. The problem is that the boundaries between dream and reality are beginning to blur so much that Stéphane is hung up between the two.
   This complicates his relationship with a new neighbor, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). She shares Stéphane’s wild creative bent, but only so far. She is frustrated by his escapism, and his constant withdrawal from connection. His awkwardness turns to obscene rudeness then weeping and to apologies, only to circle back again.
   To prove his love with actions rather than bad French, Stéphane breaks into Stéphanie’s apartment and mechanizes a stuffed horse that she prizes. He also creates from scrap parts a small controller that can flash time a bit forward or a bit backward at the push of a button, with amusing effect.
   Gondry’s tale is a bittersweet love story that gallops toward resolution by fits and starts. His wild imagination and creative use of special effects bring Stéphane’s bizarre dreams to life, so that we too believe they are even more the reality than his office job. The struggle is to connect dreams and hopes with life, a task Stéphane finds harder the more he wants it.
   The score by Jean-Michel Bernard (Henry and June) is as dreamy and wildly imaginative as the settings in which Stéphane and Stéphanie float about when not connected to terra firma. It’s evocative of Brazilian popular music with a French twist.
   Unfettered by the straitjacket of others’ scripts (even those as winsomely offbeat as Kaufman’s), Michel Gondry proves he is his own man. He can stand up on his own two stilts and overreach into the surreal with the best of them. His skewed and humorous vision is a delight to see, spinning off into its own special orbit.
Rated R for language, some sexual content and nudity. In English, French and Spanish with English subtitles.