The Science of Sleep
Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) has been duped. After his father’s death, his mother sent for him in Mexico to come back to his childhood home in Paris, where she found him a job. But alas, it is a job that does not allow creative input. Stephane arrives for his first day bright eyed and bushy capped in his beanie, ready to pitch his calendar of “disasterology,” which features a new disaster each month. However, the big boss man, forces him to cut and paste daily to pay his bills, which Stephane probably does not have to pay since he is back home living in his mother’s flat.
Stephane’s new job is one blow in a blitzkrieg of reality. He has lost his beloved father with whom he moved to Mexico after his parent’s divorce, his mother with whom he cannot communicate has transplanted him to Paris, where he has trouble understanding and speaking the language, and he is about to start having girl trouble with his arts-and-crafts neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). These two share the same name (a hint at the fundamental narcissism of the film) and world. Together they can see cotton clouds float and imagine that Stephane’s inventions work. The significant difference between them is that Stephane has trouble differentiating between reality and his fantasies, which he relies on more and more as reality continues to exacerbate his inability to cope with it.
After a few days in Paris, Stephane begins to sink under the pressures of the adult world, back under his bed covers, into the dreams from which he does not want to wake. He has grown too big for his baby’s bed, but he is reluctant to leave it. This is the central drama of Michel Gondry’s latest film The Science of Sleep, his third feature film and first without scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman, the enchantment and direction of whose scripts are greatly missed.
There is no room for doubt, Gondry is a visual virtuoso. He has a magical way of turning cloth into snowy mountains, cardboard into vibrant cities, and cellophane and cotton into bath water. His creations are breathtaking, but he refuses the viewer breathing room in which to recuperate. The result: we drown under a flood of invention. Much like his Stephane, Gondry is maniacally compelled to show us his creations and often he is too selfish to consider his audience. He exhausts his viewers’ patience so that sitting through the film is comparable to being marooned at a narcissistic child’s tea party for way too long.
The lack of a developed script cripples the film. The basic conflict: dreamer versus reality is shopworn. There is potential in the old themes, but they need to be developed, something that Gondry does not do. He leaves the script fallow, thus trite. Ultimately, the film is like the bicycle helmets Stephane attaches together with electrical wire to create a device that can transmit thoughts; it is cute but it requires too much unjustified effort on the viewer’s part to make it work. Gondry sends the viewer on a treasure hunt through a crowded closet of gimmicks in which he has hidden a very dull penny.
If the film fails to live up to Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we cannot blame the actors. Bernal is competent, and Gainsbourg is convincing when subdued; when she performs her emotional outburst she shatters the reality of her character. The film owes its most enjoyable moments to Alain Chabat, whose Guy might be crude and uncultured but compared to Stephane is less self-centered and far more fun. With moments of enchantment cancelled out by childish bravura, the film teeters at a C.
|
