Film
Dream on
by Philip Matthews
A lot of films pose as strange, but this is the real thing.
Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep is set about equally in the world of dreaming and the world of wakefulness, but the two worlds aren’t so separate. Dream images spill into normal life; confusion doesn’t end when dreams do. Stephane Miroux (Gael Garcia Bernal), the impish man-boy protagonist of Gondry’s inventive, nutty, almost-brilliant film, keeps finding himself in dream situations: he’s stuck holding a piano on a staircase, people switch languages on him mid-sentence, he meets a woman much like him who almost has his name (Stephanie).
Gondry’s last film was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an instant classic that is also the best adaptation of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay – and not just because the tricky narrative actually came to some kind of resolution (Kaufman’s scripts for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation both fell apart in the last third) but because Gondry brought the witty surrealism of his music videos with him. The memory scenes – a tiny Jim Carrey with a giant Kate Winslet in the kitchen of his childhood; the vanishing bookstore, the collapsing beach-house – were pure Gondry, as was the handmade approach to effects, building sets and playing tricks with perspective.
As the title suggests, the new Gondry film – his first feature as a writer – has the same goofy pseudo-science, more shonky low-budget inventions. We first encounter Stephane inside his dream-house, which resembles the set of a TV chat show fashioned from cardboard. Stephane operates the cardboard camera, plays the cardboard drums. He does a cooking demonstration on the cardboard stove – “Tonight I’ll show you how dreams are prepared” – stirring in random thoughts, reminiscences of the day, memories of the past as though he was making pasta sauce. On waking, the French-Mexican Stephane has just arrived in Paris, where his mother has found him a job as a graphic designer with a calendar company. On his first day at work, Stephane is disappointed to find that his new employers don’t want to publish his “disasterology” calendar – a set of 12 paintings of month-appropriate disasters.
Like the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, Gondry has an uncanny knack for ideal dream locations: staircases, cramped flats, windowless rooms. Stephane does his design work in a basement, making calendars with glue and scissors and typesetting machines. This is apparently the present day, but all the technology, both onscreen and off, is hands-on, handmade: stop-motion animation, seas made of cellophane, those sets made of cardboard. The chance meeting on a staircase between a piano and Stephane introduces him to Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his new neighbour. As with everyone Stephane meets while awake, there’s an obscure sense that he’s being made fun of – which is why his dream-life is packed with images of mastery, overcoming humiliation: ransacking the boss’s office, flying over the cardboard city, having sex with co-workers.
A lot of films pose as strange, but this is the real thing. Naturally, the plot is gloriously unpredictable. There are Freudian mistakes – Stephanie: “How’s your dad … er, hand?” – and lapses in logic. Stephane invents an ESP device and a time machine – both seem to work. Time and space are there to be collapsed like so many beach-houses.
At times, this film qualifies as a surrealist manifesto (“Death to organisation!” Stephane declares, and a workmate denounces the tyranny of the TV set). It might also be personal: that first image of Stephane playing his pretend drums and directing with his pretend camera could be an unconscious reminder that Gondry was a drummer in a French rock band and got his start directing music videos in the 1980s when that band needed a promo clip (after he spent a few years making videos in the French music business, Bjork brought him to the attention of the English-speaking world).
But it seems personal in more than just Gondry’s possible identification with Stephane’s various confusions and murky self-awareness, his romantic yearning and artistic introversion, but in its feel, too: this is looser, scruffier, more idiosyncratic and less focused than Eternal Sunshine, maybe the crazy night to Sunshine’s bright day.
THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, directed by Michel Gondry
THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, directed by Michel Gondry
