Progressive Wednesday

The TGIF Movie Review: The Science of Sleep

The Science of Sleep — written and directed by Michel Gondry, who also happened to direct the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — is the Platonic form of art-house flicks. As such, it's a bit of an acquired taste. Not like chocolate-covered caviar soup with Tabasco, but more like something created by Hiroyuki Sakai, the in-house French cook on the Iron Chef (not the American version, but the original and far superior Japanese show).

This is ultimately two movies for the price of one: an analysis of the nature of dreams, and a love story. Stephane, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, pines for his next-door neighbor, Stephanie, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Part of Stephane’s problem, besides the fact that Stephanie doesn’t seem to share his affection, is that he has difficulty distinguishing between dreamscapes and reality. To me, this makes sense because dreams really are part of our realities, concoctions of our unconscious fused into our memories, whether we like them or not. Stephane wants to express his desire for Stephanie, but stumbles with language and action. It calls to mind lyrics from the Wilco song “I’m The Man Who Loves You”:

All I can see is black and white

and white and pink with blades of blue

that lay between the words I think on a page

I was meaning to send to

you [but] I couldn’t tell if it’d bring my heart

the way I wanted when I started

writing this letter to you

but if I could you know I would

just hold your hand and you’d understand

I’m the man who loves you.

We end up empathizing with Stephane, whose dreams haunt him and delight him, whose dreams leave him obsessed with the positive and negative possibilities of life, whose desires and fears confuse and confound him. We empathize, in part, because we realize throughout the film that dreams are the ways we wish the world was or ways we’re glad the world isn’t.

Maybe metaphors are the best way to describe a movie that's like watching a metaphor about reveries unfold. It's Being John Malkovich meets Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's like watching the lovechild film of Jackson Pollock, Gertrude Stein, and the Rubix Cube. It’s a beautiful cable access show mixed in a blender with sunflowers. “Randomness,” says Stephanie, “is very difficult to achieve.” But achieve it Gondry does. This movie is an experiment with visual, musical, and linguistic art (there are three different languages used in the film!).

It’s worth it to see The Science of Sleep for the sheer visual spectacle of it all, since it’s more graphic exposition than narrative. If this film is a claymation Mack Truck, then there’s a wild and wise mind behind the wheel. See it in the trailer for yourself.