The Science of Sleep
Jim Schembri, Reviewer
May 4, 2007
A visually vibrant romantic fantasy featuring a wonderfully breezy performance by Gael Garcia Bernal.
After his triumph with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the visual wizardry he displayed in music videos for the Chemical Brothers and Bjork, French director Michel Gondry strikes gold with The Science of Sleep, a self-penned, visually vibrant romantic fantasy.
Set in France, it tells of the frustrated artistic and amorous desires of a handsome nerd called Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal). He wants to be a visual artist, but lands a dull job in a small publishing company that churns out cheesy calendars and is staffed by oddballs.
His troubles are compounded when he meets his attractive neighbour Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). She likes Stephane, but not in the way he likes her.
With much of his waking life beyond his control, Stephane follows the Walter Mitty route by taking refuge in his dreams, where he runs a television studio made of cardboard.
With the boundaries between reality and fantasy becoming increasingly blurred, Gondry indulges all manner of visual trickery while always keeping in focus the emotional heart of his tender, quirk-filled love story.
Notably, Gondry eschews the dazzle and smoothness of digital effects for a deliberately rough analog look, using stopmotion animation, crude visual composites and sets that were literally cut and pasted together out of odds and ends.
Even more impressive, though, is the wonderfully breezy performance Gondry elicits from Bernal. After his serious turns in The Motorcycle Diaries, Babel, The King, Bad Education and The Crime of Father Amaro (arguably his best performance), Bernal buys into Gondry’s comic world of quirks, contraptions and strange ideas with a commitment that is as obvious as it is enjoyable to watch.
