The Science of Sleep
The Science of Sleep poses a conundrum before the reels begin turning. Is La Science des Rêves the correct title? The French more accurately describes a film that is swallowed up by the surrealism of dreams. The entire story takes place in Paris (Paris, France). The bulk of the dialogue, however, is conducted in English, with lots of French on the side and a bit of Spanish. Writing in The Onion, Tasha Robinson calls it an "indie version of Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, albeit with none of the star power, a quarter of the budget, half the angst, and twice the charm."
What it's called, this is not a picture for people who want a strong story, or who are uncomfortable with the failure or the refusal to resolve problems. Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) loves his neighbor, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), but Stéphanie, although she likes Stéphane, doesn't love him. Period. Stéphane copes with rejection by dreaming richly. Some of his dreams are dream-like, set forth with gross implausibility (My favorite just might be the little car, fashioned of corrugated cardboard, with which Stéphane tries to flee the police). Others are entirely naturalistic, belied only by the presence of Stéphane's father, whose death before the beginning of the story seems to have triggered some sort of upset in the young man's mind. By the movie's end, Stéphane has passed into a narcoleptic state that makes it impossible to mark the crossing from wakeful reality into dreamland. This will irritate viewers who need to know what's "really" going on, as well as people who don't believe that dreams are real.
Surrealism is essentially a comic mode: you can be horrified that things are not what they appear to be, but it's much easier just to laugh. Mr Gondry is a genius when it comes to laughter-inducing imagery. His good-natured manner encouraged me to sit back and let him do whatever he was going to do, without complaining. In this way, the film itself became a dream. Not somebody else's dream but my dream. When water poured from a faucet in tiny sheets of cellophane, I had the strangest feeling of needing to wake up, and when an upright piano lurched down several flights of a spiral staircase with an aplomb that signaled Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box, I bolted upright in my seat as though I'd dozed off.
The Science of Sleep is a very melancholy movie, but I was never three minutes away from a good laugh. Mr García Bernal commands an immense dramatic ranger, and throws his character into reckless situations with what looks like but surely can't be total abandon. He is boyish here in a way that he was not in La mala educacíon. (In the earlier movie, there is something fraudulent about his ingenuousness, and for a very good reason.) He also seems destined to play the roles of troubled men - men who want to curl up beneath a comforter in a fetal position. I hope that he'll be given lots of room in which to stretch. Ms Gainsbourg's real-life Stéphanie - if we can used that term at all - is calm and gentle, but when Stéphanie appears in one of Stéphane's dreams, she's ready to do anything. It would be possible to see her part here as that of a sorceress. I had read that she sounds just like her mother (Jane Birkin) when she speaks English, but I was surprised to discover that this is true. Alain Chabat, Aurélia Petit, Sacha Bourdo and Emma de Caunes do fine work in the supporting cast, but, perhaps because Mr Gondry is so successful at creating a dream world, their characters never build up any heft. Miou-Miou is great, too, but, born in 1950, she has definitely outgrown her stage name.
While aware that there are many things in The Science of Sleep that might set viewers against it - particularly if they're being forced to sit through it by the fan-cy of a near and dear person - I believe that this movie is a reliable test of a moviegoer's ability to surrender to the dreamlike in any film.
