The Science of Sleep

'Science can be sleepy'

No one can ever say now that Michel Gondry has no imagination. This man brought us Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature, both of which were written by Charlie Kaufman. He has directed numerous music videos and commercials and shorts and has pioneered a lot of techniques along the way. His latest outing, The Science of Sleep deals with dreams and the imagination as much of his previous work has, but the biggest difference is that this time, he's the writer.

The Science of Sleep is fairly hard to decipher what is going on, but it is essentially a story of romance and one man and one woman trying to figure the other out while falling in love. All of this of course while the main male character seems to be slowly going crazy and having an especially hard time differentiating his dreams from reality. Also embroiled into the whole mess is Michel Gondry's explanation of sleep and dreams. Quite a heady topic? Similar to the great Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry is not afraid to turn his scenes into dream sequences that intermix with the reality of the film in interesting and mind bending ways. The problem is that unlike the aforementioned film, the story of The Science of Sleep is not grounded enough in a stable reality to allow most people to piece the story back together in any sort of accuracy. Character decisions and changes in mood are dictated in the dreams and sometimes vice versa until the dream world becomes reality and indistinguishable, which in a society used to reality or absurdity, to mix the two makes the story incredibly hard to follow. Of course, it does make the entire film feel like an incredibly long dream. The problem is that with any film in which the story is hard to follow, the film feels infinitely longer which translates to boring. People tend to go to movies to see stories unfold in front of their eyes and unlike most of Europe and other countries, America does not have a rich history of succesful experimental films. I don't want to call the movie boring because it shouldn't be due to the incredible blending of animation and illusions and reality. But I did find myself surfing the internet at times and not really giving a crap about the characters for the most part. Michel Gondry wrote the film based on his own dreams and it is nice to see how the dreams and reality influence each other and how he was able to craft a dream aesthetic and structure for the film, the problem is that it feels like the story rambles and in doing so can easily lose the viewer. Besides that flaw, the film is magnificent with interesting visuals and symbols on screen throughout. The actors do a terrific job and the story itself is amusing to those who can keep up with it. I think as a freshman feature writing effort on Michel Gondry's part, not bad. And I look forward to his next big thing.

The two main actors are Gael Garcia Bernal as Stephane Miroux, a childish young man trying to find a job that lets him use and manipulate his imagination to his hearts content, and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Stephanie, which the names should tell you something. Garcia Bernal proves himself again in such a scatterbrained movie by navigating skillfully through all of the twists and turns to create a movie that can be followed if watched closely enough. It is also very amusing how his ability to speak French is mocked in fun and so a lot of times the movie changes between Spanish, French, and English. Charlotte Gainsbourg does an excllent job of coming off as the elite french woman who is interested in more of the punk scene. The sentiments of both characters are very odd and unrelatable to me, but I know several people like them all of whom are artists. Although perhaps the most amusing cast members are the ones who work with Stephane at his boring calendar job. Their little quips and interactions with Stephane and each other are hilarious and keep absurd and awkward scenes alive and laughable. Excellent job by the cast at conveying characters and figments in such a manner as to be amusing no matter which realm they are in.

Conclusion:
The film has a wonderful child-like aesthetic and joy inherent in the making of it that rejoices in the simplicity of making something. It pokes fun at itself and it is highly enjoyable. The problem as already mentioned is the story and how it is hard to find a basis for it when the basis is constantly changing in a blurrd world of absurdity and non-fiction. The cast is great and the editing and animation are top notch for such an interesting experimental piece that only a French man could have concocted. If you feel yourself get sleepy after all of the crazy imagery seems to blast by in a whirl, do what I did, grab a coke, pause, rewind, and try to understand and if not that, enjoy.

4.1 out of 5

Wannabe