The Science of Sleep

By Tom Charity

“I hate my dreams,” admitted Laurie Anderson. “They’re so… infantile.”

As this year’s Sundance festival selections subside in the memory I’m bound to admit the films I’m looking forward to seeing again are few and far between. Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson would be one, for Ryan Gosling’s conflicted fuck-up of an inspirational teacher (imagine School of Rock with more sex and drugs, and no jokes). Jonathan Demme’s self-styled “dream Neil Young concert” Heart of Gold would be another. But for the most part, watching even the better part of Sundance dramatic entries one had the feeling of being ahead of the filmmakers, of having seen this low key, character-driven, politically correct movie before, maybe more than once already.

Which probably goes some way to account for the response to the world premiere of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep. Making my way through the lobby of the Eccles afterwards, exchanging the obligatory first impressions, it occurred to me I’d rarely seen so many critics smiling. Part of this might have been relief. Not only because Science stood in such sharp contrast to everything else we were seeing, but because going in, for once, no one really knew what to expect. Not that Gondry’s talent is in question: there is ample evidence in his pop videos, commercials, and shorts that he’s perhaps the most inventive cine-magician since Georges Mélies. But Mélies never made a feature. Here, Monsieur Gondry was working in his native France , and for the first time from his own original screenplay. Who knew if he could write?

Actually the jury is still out on that question. There is much in The Science of Sleep that might read as irredeemably cute, silly, or juvenile when transcribed on the page. The plot, if it can be called that, doesn’t get far beyond boy meets girl. You wonder to what degree he worked from a conventional screenplay at all. Introducing the movie at Sundance he thanked the French production company Gaumont “for giving me exactly what I asked for even if I didn’t always know exactly what I wanted.” But speaking for myself, Gondry’s film elicited a giddy exhilaration that had next to nothing to do with character arcs, story construction, or political point-scoring, and everything to do with cinema. When it comes to camera-stylo, Gondry is a virtuoso.

How, then, to describe The Science of Sleep on paper? For a start, it’s not the story of a man held captive by the people in his dreams, as early synopses indicated. A man at the mercy of his own imagination is closer to it. We might call it a concept movie, not in the sense of high or low, 25 words or less, but to reflect that the nearest thing to a guiding principle here is chaos theory. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Science of Sleep seeks to channel the stream of unconsciousness: memory, to be sure, but also fantasy, desire, paranoia, humiliation—the dream life where angels fear to tread.

Fluffy animal suits. Cotton reel ski lifts. Cellophane streams. Rereading my notes the morning after the screening, 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 giant 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 rêves.)

The first words in my notebook are “random thoughts,” the first, perhaps crucial ingredient in the dream recipe concocted by Stéphane (Gael Garcia Bernal) 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. Slicky amateurish in the manner of youth TV presenters across Europe and beyond, 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 auteurs.

If Stéphane TV represents one projected reality, in another (what some might call “the real world”) he’s a young graphic designer newly returned to Paris after growing up in Mexico with his late father. 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.

Like a modern day Billy Liar, Stéphane is so bursting with ideas that he can’t quite see straight. He meets his soulmate when 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. With the liberal application of what he calls “randomized synchronicity,” Stéphane sets out to 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.

Undoubtedly, the film invites Freudian interpretation, though it will take more than a single viewing to decode such a flood of surreal imagery. Certainly it’s not too much of a stretch to read the boyish, artistic fantasist Stéphane Miroux as Gondry’s alter-ego. And Stéphanie, would be his female mirror-(Miroux?) image, a functional, moderate double stripped of male ego. (Charlotte Gainsbourg’s grounded performance makes this character more appealing than you might suspect.) Meanwhile, Alain Chabat—as Stéphane’s sex-obsessed colleague and friend, Guy—might serve as the rampant id, as well as regular comic relief.

On the one hand Stéphane’s irrepressible fantasy life 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. By the end of the movie he’s less a charmingly whimsical romantic than a psychotic wretch, regressing to an alarmingly infantile state without recourse to the mind suck that afflicts Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine.

It’s not the conclusion that the dream factory would sign off on. Yet Gondry’s effervescent, pulsating, unpredictable movie revels in an uninhibited aesthetic freedom and creative zest that’s utterly alien to the current North American independent scene. I’d watch it again in a heartbeat.

Science of Sleep

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