I Have a Dream, a Fantasy, to Help Me through Reality
The Science of Sleep / Jeremy C. Fox
“I’m not convinced that Gondry is an expressively great film director — that his virtuosity is joined to his heart.” David Edelstein wrote that two and a half years ago, in his otherwise gushing review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and, on the evidence before us now, who could argue? Michel Gondry’s follow-up to Eternal Sunshine, the new The Science of Sleep, is a fascinating, beautiful, lewd, and boundlessly imaginative film — think Buñuel by way of Godard — but beneath its psychedelic surrealism and constant visual invention lies a love story that is, at best, half-hearted.
In Science, Gael García Bernal plays Stéphane Miroux, a clearly autobiographical character who shares most of Gondry’s preoccupations and all of his solipsism. Stéphane fancies himself an artist, and his mother has gotten him a job at a small calendar-printing company where he thinks he’ll be designing and illustrating the calendars. He’s painted a set of famous disasters, a project he calls Disasterology, and he thinks the new job will be his chance to share them with the world. But when he gets there, he finds that he’s been hired to operate the antiquated typesetting machine and actually physically cut-and-paste the copy for the calendars. Almost as bad as the job, though, are his new coworkers: quiet, continually harassed Martine (Aurélia Petit); her assistant Serge (Sacha Bourdo), who speaks English like a ’70s swinger; and lecherous Guy (Alain Chabat), whose outward appearance as a boring, middle-aged office drone masks the obnoxious, bullying adolescent he truly is.
In addition to his Disasterology project, Stéphane is an inventor of impractical Rube Goldberg contraptions and fanciful devices like glasses that let you see real life in 3-D and a time machine that can move you one second into the future or into the past. His imagination and naïveté can be charming, but his childishness creates problems for him — he lives so much in his dreams that he can scarcely distinguish between them and reality. And after a while, neither can we.
As soon as he settles into his mother’s apartment, Stéphane has a meet-cute with his new neighbor after her clumsy movers drop a piano and crush his hand. She’s a fabric artist named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg, who was Sean Penn’s wife in 21 Grams), a sweet girl, but skinny and a bit plain, with lank hair and a strong jaw similar to Patti Smith in her youth. She quickly develops a crush on Stéphane, but he’s drawn to her more conventionally attractive friend Zoé (Emma de Caunes), who has a boyfriend and isn’t interested in him. Though Stéphane is initially distracted by Zoé’s more obvious charms, as he gets to know Stéphanie, he warms to her eccentricity and begins to reciprocate her crush. But she resists her feelings because she knows of his initial preference and doesn’t want to be hurt or humiliated.
A viewer can admire and be amused by what Gondry’s doing without ever really connecting emotionally with the film. The unpredictability of his script is a welcome break from the typical, formulaic romantic comedy. And it’s wise about the difficulties of love — as in life, nothing here goes according to plan — and funny in an absurdist way, but the digressions into Stéphane’s dreamlife and the goings-on at the office detract from the love story. Gondry’s music videos and previous films have employed the logic and imagery of dreams, often to great effect, but in those cases he was forced to keep his navel-gazing in check either due to the brevity of a pop song or the constraints imposed by an existing script. (It helped, too, that both his previous features were written by Charlie Kaufman, whose sense of the absurd dovetails nicely with Gondry’s visual wit.) But here, with 105 minutes to kill and his own screenplay to work from, Gondry seems far too distracted by his cinematic games to keep his focus on the lovers, and they become interchangeable with his stop-motion creatures and other fanciful gewgaws. Finally, at the film’s close, we get a palpable sense of the characters’ need for each other, their desperation to connect, but by then it’s too little too late.
Jeremy C. Fox is a founding critic of Pajiba and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.You may email him at jeremycfox[at]gmail.com.
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Comments
I have to disagree with your review here. I think the movie shows how Stephane prefers his dream relationships to his real life because he has the control in his dreams. I felt the chemistry between both Stephane and Stephanie was brilliant. They sort of provided flips sides of a coin. Stephane being one who constructs his reality around his dreams and Stephanie being one who constructs her dreasm around her reality.
Posted by: Brian at October 1, 2006 6:43 PM
I liked this movie so much more than eternal sunshine... i didn't want it to end. The communication between Stephane and Stephanie, as they were in his dreams, was so much like being in love.
I'm surprised at your review- it's like how Stephane describes his love for her as inspired by the connection between her brain/synapses /fingers- when he's wriggling his thumbs trying to express that, it's an imperfect relationship. Oh god, I just loved it. Highly recommend.
Posted by: akr at October 1, 2006 7:06 PM
Sounds good...and really, who am I kidding, I'll watch Garcia Bernal read a friggin' phone book.
Posted by: em at October 2, 2006 11:14 AM
I have to disagree as well. I think that if you didn't go into the film expecting a love story, then you wouldn't be disappointed.
Posted by: angela at October 2, 2006 12:10 PM
For my part, I agree with the review. I really really wanted to love this film; in fact I think I was expecting to be blown away by it. The irony being, of course, that "expecting" to be blown away kind of eliminates the possibility of being blown away. After the film, my friends and I talked about it and settled on the conclusion that it seemed less like a story and more like a string of tricks, ranging from cutesy to authentically amazing. I got the distinct impression that Michel Gondry sat down at his desk, found all his old scraps of ideas cut from other work, and pasted them on a screenplay. Of course, the result is still much more interesting than most of what is showed in theatres today. But I still couldn't help but feeling a little...tricked. (I guess that's what I get for having expectations - it's not like I wanted Eternal Sunshine Part II...but, yeah, I kind of wanted Eternal Sunshine Part II. And it's not fair to castigate this film on that basis alone.)
Anyways, I truly believe that in the future, after I've bought it on DVD and forgotten about the hype and forgotten about what I originally wanted it to be, the film will be able to speak for itself. Then I will be able to see the cute, sweet, highly weird film I wanted to see when I went to theatre on Friday night.
Posted by: em-ily at October 2, 2006 12:52 PM
I totally agreed with this review. Though I loved Eternal Sunshine (yeah, who doesn't in the crowd that reads this site...), I had somewhat lowered expectations for this film, since it wasn't being written by Kaufman.
I'm really glad you wrote it - it got just the words right, and I have a hard time describing my conflicting my feeling about it sometimes, especially when you pointed out how you can observe and respect Gondry's ingenuity and spirit, and yet be completely detached from the love story. By the end of the film, it does become resolutionless cinematic navel-gazing, and I was just frustrated as a viewer, it felt like so much time wasted.
Posted by: Anonoguy at October 2, 2006 3:52 PM
I really enjoyed this, probably because I had no expectations for it. I think actually the love story was shown perfectly - if you assume that the romance in question was never quite on an even keel. The imbalance between Stephane and Stephanie was beautiful, and I loved how Gondry camoflaged Stephane's creepiness until so close to the end; suddenly, he was no longer sweet.
Posted by: Ryan at October 2, 2006 4:04 PM
I agree with the review, I went in expecting far more in terms of a story, and in terms of creativity on Gondrys part. Instead I was met with a character I ultimately couldnt sympathize for, and visuals that seemed like he was trying too hard to seem quirky.
Posted by: JT at October 2, 2006 6:39 PM
Stéphane has a meet-cute with his new neighbor
Huh?
Posted by: Farrah at October 2, 2006 8:21 PM
I love both Bernal and Gondry, so I guess I probably won't even take this review too seriously...you know with the bias and all...
Posted by: Gina at October 4, 2006 2:24 PM
Wow, I can't believe no one picked up on the blatant ABBA reference in the title of this review. I salute you, Mr. Fox. Not everyone has the cojones to drop finely-crafted Swedish pop lyrics into a movie review.
And I'll probably go see this. Bernal is great, and Gondry is wickedly entertaining.
Posted by: Josh at October 4, 2006 3:03 PM
Thought this film was extremely well done. For me, the elusiveness of love in stephane's life was the love story. It seemed that what most characterized stephane was his disconnectedness from people. I'm surprised that the mourning of his father's death isn't considered in the review- especially in the context of his calender of catastrophies. In this regard, I found the relationship between Stephane and Guy interesting.
Posted by: MK at October 9, 2006 12:36 AM
I really did enjoy this. I haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind though so maybe that was partly why. Though the job was somewhat distracting, I still liked the scenes. It's just so much better than the usual romantic movies we get, but even without comparing it to those movies that are lacking, I still thought it was good. A lot of people thought it was too strange, and so they couldn't concentrate on what was really happening. I liked how strange his dreams were though, I liked not being able to understand part of it, and then getting to self-interpret.
Posted by: Camille at October 15, 2006 7:54 PM
I was moved by the way ths director made me keep thinking of the similarities of my dreams and his scenes. And that when i dream i like the ones about love, connection and happiness through the dream , so i dont wake up crying i want to go back .this flick had a nice finish. i loved it!
Posted by: barbara at March 7, 2007 11:33 AM
A weird aside: as I was reading this review a song by Charlotte Gainsbourgh started playing in my Pandora radio [www.pandora.com]. I love this actress - got hooked on her after her brilliant turn as Jane Eyre - but I had no idea she was a musician too. Her quirky, breathy voice lends itself quite well to song, by the by.
Posted by: lauren at March 19, 2007 3:10 PM