The Science of Sleep Review
By Joe Lozito
Daydream Believer
Michel Gondry is a director to watch. Regardless of the medium (short, feature-length, music video), you can count on him to come up with something visually stunning. In the lightly autobiographical "The Science of Sleep (La Science des Rêves)", Mr. Gondry turns his whimsical eye towards a script of his own creation - and that may be the problem with the film. Without a script from his frequent collaborator Charlie Kaufman - with whom he made the masterful "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" as well as the unfairly-ignored trifle "Human Nature" - Mr. Gondry's "Science" goes too far into the realm of fantasy and lacks a crucial grounding that could have made it truly fantastic.
In "Science", Stéphane (the always-charming Gael García Bernal), a young graphic designer and inventor, moves back to his boyhood home in France where his mother has found him a job (despite the setting, English is spoken much of the time - and some Spanish). Sadly for Stéphane, the job is mind-numbing typesetting work. Happily for Stéphane, his dreamlife is so vivid (he hosts a talk show in his head called "The Stéphane Show") that he has a means of escape every time he closes his eyes. Mr. Gondry spends much of the film having fun with the overlap between Stéphane's dreaming and waking life, but the film never settles into a rhythm, even when Stéphane meets his neighbor named, wouldn't you know it, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Is Stephanie the girl of Stéphane's dreams? Or is that only the case
in his dreams?
This being a Michel Gondry film, there are plenty of visual flights of fancy to hold your attention. Mr. Gondry's dream world is full of stop-motion animation, shifting perspectives and whirlwinds of flying paper. My personal favorite is the city made completely of cardboard tubing. There are also some wonderful scenes of flight using underwater photography. The resulting effect isn't just visually interesting but truly evokes that all-too familiar feeling of floating in a dream.
And that might be the problem with "Science". It's only truly interesting when it exists in a dream world. In the film's reality, nothing is at stake. The lovers - while each is a good actor - don't make a convincing couple, so there's little interest in seeing them end up together. Stéphane and Stephanie get along famously - they're both artistic with household objects - but is that reality or imagination? "Science" seems to have little interest in answering the question. In "Science", the lines blur but never add up.
