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The Science of Sleep Review
12 Feb 2007
Critics rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
The Science of Sleep

It's taken over a year for Michel Gondry's movie to get a UK release since its Sundance premiere.

During that time it's twice been pushed back in the calendar, presumably because Warner Bros - who picked up international distribution rights at the festival - don't have a clue what to do with it. In the US, it made less than $5 million. I mention this not because a film's box office take is any indication of its quality, but because Hollywood always finds it harder to sell something different. That's why so few films are.

Cast details

Gondry - so far anyway - isn't playing the studio game. He made his name with oddball pop videos for Bjork and Massive Attack, often mixing childish, naïf ideas with innovative technique to create something singular and surreal. His first film was a misfire - Human Nature, with Rhys Ifans and a hirsute Patricia Arquette - but he got it right second time round, with Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. He also made the successful non-fiction film, Block Party.

The Science Of Sleep is the first feature Gondry has also written (the other two were by Charlie Kaufman), and his first film made in France (though much of the movie is actually in English). It plays a bit like unfinished business from Eternal Sunshine, but it's much less structured, more free and whimsical. The first words I scribbled down in my notebook were 'Random thoughts', the first, perhaps crucial ingredient in the dream recipe concocted by Gael Garcia Bernal - Stéphane - in the cardboard TV studio that's playing inside his head. The other ingredients: reminiscences of the day, memories, music and enough spaghetti for two.

Fluffy animal suits. Cotton reel ski lifts. Cellophane streams. Rereading my notes later, I wondered if I'd watched this movie, or dreamed it - just as the film appears to dream itself into being from bits and pieces of Gondry's previous work: the giants hands from the Foo Fighters Everlong video; animal costumes from Bjork's Human Behaviour; transmogrifying perspectives from the  White Stripes Denial Twist; and everywhere that free-flowing mélange of stop motion animation, optical effects and location shooting which is his natural mode of expression. (The French title, incidentally, is the more precise 'La Science des reves', the science of dreams.)

The Science of Sleep

Slicky amateurish, sporting a tight-fitting purple suit and high beam smile, Stéphane addresses us in pick-and-mix English, French and Spanish, throwing in the odd impromptu drum-roll for rhetorical punctuation and operating his own cardboard cut-out camera. In our dreams, we are the complete auteurs.

If Stéphane TV represents one projected reality, in another he's a young graphic designer newly returned to Paris after growing up in Mexico with his late father (thus explaining his rudimentary French). His mother (Miou Miou) has set him up with a job designing calendar art - but when he reports for duty he finds the boss unreceptive to his 'disasterology' calendar (each month depicts a landmark human catastrophe) and is installed in a menial position cutting and pasting days and dates instead.

How do we cope with a deadening job? Like a modern day Billy Liar, Stéphane is bursting with so many ideas he can't quite see straight. Reality takes a back seat to his fantasy life. The two become confusingly enmeshed when his soulmate Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) moves in to the apartment next door, and he's run over by her piano on the stairs. Although he's initially more taken with her sexy best friend, Zoe (Emma de Caunes), it's Stéphanie he really connects with, instinctively sensing a creative collaborator.

The Science of Sleep is a delightful movie from a real artist. It's unreasonably funny, romantic and imaginative, but it also dares to leave us with a strange, slightly sour after-taste.

With the liberal application of what he calls 'randomized synchronicity', Stéphane will destroy the world and make it over in his image. He will woo the girl and win her with his ingenious devices: a one-second time-machine; an animatronic pony. And then, being only human, he will screw it all up.

Stéphane's irrepressible day dreaming seems to represent a more vital and uninhibited engagement with the world around him he sees possibilities and correspondences in everyday objects that simply don't occur to other people (not for nothing does he present Stéphanie with 3-D glasses for real life, even though, as she quite rightly points out, real life is already in 3-D).

But on the other (giant) hand, it's Stéphane's shaky grip on reality that leaves him prey to his paranoia, neuroses and narcissism. Bernal is obviously playing Gondry here, but quite how we're supposed to understand this surprisingly tortured quality I'm not sure.

The Science of Sleep is a delightful movie from a real artist. It's unreasonably funny, romantic and imaginative, but it also dares to leave us with a strange, slightly sour after-taste. Savour that, if only because the Hollywood machine would never normally allow it.

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