The Science of Sleep
Written & directed by Michael Gondry.
Starring: Gael Bernal Garcia and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
The Science of Sleep is about a creative bilingual artist who gets dreams mixed up with reality and whose mind is run by his very own cardboard-clad TV show. Yes, this could only be a Michel Gondry film!
The French auteur returns to the screen with his most personal film yet and his screenwriting debut. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Stephane, who has travelled to France to live in his mother's apartment after the death of his Spanish father. He becomes trapped in a boring job with a sex-obsessed boss and two co-workers who keep calling each other gay. When a piano falls on him, he meets his neighbours Zoe and Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), within whom he finds a kindred spirit. Trouble ensues when Stephane increasingly finds himself inverting reality and dreams.
The Science of Sleep is weird (effectively a demented romantic comedy), so naturally it had me smiling from the get-go. Gondry fans will revel in the drum-playing, animal-suit-wearing, White Stripes- listening, home-made-inventing, embarrassingly childlike qualities of the protagonist.
As to be expected with Gondry, the film's dream sequences are full of amazing visual effects, mixing stop-motion, animation, reverse-motion and outrageously imaginative props. Just as Stephane's recipe for a good dream, The Science of Sleep is the result of many eclectic, wacky Gondry ideas that he somehow manages to turn into an endearingly raw and chaotic film.
Gael Garcia Bernal is excellent as Gondry's cinematic alter ego Stephane, but lacks chemistry with love interest Stephanie, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose soft-voiced performance and thin, scraggy appearance I found distractingly irritating. The use of three different languages — French, English and Spanish — is well integrated and adds worldliness to the tale. The plot stumbles towards the end, but witnessing Gondry's filmmaking is so much fun that this hardly matters.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind remains Gondry's best film, but here he gets to stretch his wings a little more, breaking away from previous collaborator Charlie Kaufman. Such experimental filmmaking is a very refreshing experience — and with blockbusters ruling the cinemas for the next couple of months, this is a worthwhile departure.
3.5 Stars
Kate Conroy
