>>REVIEW
THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
STARRING Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Miou-Miou
DIRECTED BY Michel Gondry
Opens Friday, October 6
The Globe
Once so novel, digitally generated effects have become banal from overuse. Even the sight of a giant ape body-slamming a dinosaur doesn’t seem so impressive. Paradoxically, the animations in The Science of Sleep evoke wonder because they are so recognizably human in their imperfection.
In his second film of 2006, after Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, director Michel Gondry makes a Dogme-like rejection of zeroes and ones in favour of more tactile techniques. With its cardboard cityscapes and bathtubs filled with cellophane instead of water, The Science of Sleep looks less like an example of 21st-century cinema than a class project by some industrious fifth-graders.
This handmade quality is a big part of what makes The Science of Sleep so unique. Gondry and his 10-person crew spent two months creating the animations before shooting the rest of the film. Obviously, their objective was not to create a seamless universe, but one with a more naive sensibility befitting the childlike perspective of the film’s hero Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal). Likewise, the imagery is of intrinsic importance to a story that is uneasily situated between reality and Stephane’s more colourful fantasy world.
At the onset, Stephane does his best to keep things in the right place. A sheepish young man, he has returned to France after the death of his father. By day, he tries to adjust to his drab new job at a calendar publisher. By night, he supervises the flow of dreams from the imaginary control room of Stephane TV, a set constructed largely from egg cartons and a shower curtain. Stephane’s attraction to his new neighbour Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) inspires a flurry of creativity – one of his new inventions is a machine that propels them forward or backward in time, albeit only at one-second intervals – but worsens the fragile lad’s state of mind.
Initially delighted, Stephanie is ultimately exhausted by Stephane’s flights of fancy and welter of emotions – they take a toll on the viewer, too. As imaginative as The Science of Sleep is, it’s also limited by Stephane’s immaturity. He’s obsessed with the idea of love, but doesn’t know much about it – that limitation becomes clear in the story’s repetitive later stages when the director and his creation both hit an impasse. It’s Stephanie who breaks it with a speech that underlines the tale’s essentially melancholy nature. Unable to fully connect with the people around him, Gondry’s young fantasist is a prisoner of his dreams. For all their whimsy, those dreams take on a tragic aspect.
This unexpected shift in tone helps The Science of Sleep transcend some of its own imperfections as a movie. It also places Gondry – who’s proven himself to be the brightest kid in that classroom many times over already – a step closer to a mode of filmmaking that’s as emotionally rich as it is visually inventive. For the time being, it’s impressive enough to see him wring even a little bit of pathos from his handfuls of cardboard and cellophane. |
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