The Science of Sleep

The last time Michel Gondry directed a film (excluding last year’s Dave Chappelle concert detour) he made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. So, I think it’s safe to say that I both wanted and expected to enjoy this movie from the moment its Death Cab For Cutie tinged trailer broke out online. Though this is not quite as brilliant as Eternal Sunshine, it is still one of the most engaging, inventive, and exciting features of the year.

Gondry takes over writing duties here for the first time in his impressive career and proves that he might be the only screenwriter working today whose brain is as zany as Eternal Sunshine scribe Charlie Kaufman. Why the two made magic together back in 2004 is immediately obvious as The Science of Sleep channels many of Eternal Sunshine’s twisty themes.

Sleep’s heavy eyed protagonist Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) is a sympathetic manchild who often confuses his dreams with reality. In a series of misunderstandings worthy of any traditional screwball comedy, Stéphane meets and falls in love with his equally imaginative and similarly named neighbor, Stéphanie, (Charlotte Gainsbourg). They proceed to have one of the most intensely realistic courtships that I can recall in recent film history. Yet, Sleep does not settle for merely painting a stunningly accurate portrait of a very real and messy romance, it also depicts the events as seen by the dreamy Stéphane whose juvenile mind causes constant conflict in the duo’s relationship. Though at first his oddball fantasy sequences feel recklessly wacky, the film grabs hold of this device at some point early in the film and finds a way to utilize them in order to place the audience inside the disillusioned mind of the movie’s offbeat hero. While Stéphanie remains hesitant to date her weird new neighbor, Stéphane proceeds to imagine the potential disaster that lay ahead if he continues to pursue the beautiful girl next door. As time goes on, the pair grows closer together and Stéphane’s dreams grow correspondingly warm and fuzzy until they end (as does the film) with a lovely but ambiguous suggestion of an uncertain ever after.

Gondry is an absolute maestro of charmingly quirky cinema. Here he blends gritty looking indie drama with a fairly low-tech stop motion animation technique that creates an elaborate fantasy landscape simple enough to keep within the tone of the low budget feature. He also gets the best out of Bernal and Gainsbourg who both deliver refreshingly organic interpretations of these peculiar individuals. Often eccentrics in film come of as farcical caricatures, but these feel like true to life people who happen to have certain distinctly nontraditional attributes. Both Bernal and Gainsbourg have been brilliant elsewhere, but there’s a comic lightness to the material that allows them both to unveil their ability to blend drama and slapstick with the utmost integrity.

There’s just simply not going to be another film this year with such miraculously simple insights developed with such exceedingly elaborate techniques. This is a one of a kind film experience with wild humor, mind bending fantasy, and utterly truthful drama. It’s a sly, low key masterpiece in its own right.

Grade: A