Nocturnal Emissions

Michel Gondry’s the Science of Sleep is a pillow stuffed with dreamy fluff.
by Wayne Melton
Rating: 3 out of 5

The Science of Sleep is a perplexing title. This rare work of auteurship by noted music video and feature film director Michel Gondry is all about fantasy and dreams. The hapless dreamer Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), who is attempting to make a new start at his mother’s flat in France, has more than his share of both. So much, in fact, that it’s hard for both the audience and the character to tell when he is and isn’t dozing under the covers in his Pee Wee Herman-esque bedroom. The movie is so full of playful imagination that we are left to assume that the title is ironic, that the science of sleep is a sleepy science, a dreamy one that you make up as you go along—a few real figures over here, a few magic toys, flying carpets and crazy physics over there. The movie itself is kind of a magic ride, too. Whether it all means anything is another question.

The story is repeatedly posing that quandry itself, though. For one thing, neither Stéphane nor the audience ever encounter anyone familiar. The most we learn of his mother is through Stéphane’s one-sided phone conversations, so we even have to take her reality for granted. She’s away when he moves in, but has set him up with a job at a local printer of novelty calendars. Stéphane, who thinks himself an artist, goes to his first day carrying a thick portfolio and the expectation that he will be given the opportunity to prove himself, but is angered to realize that his mundane office job is to place the type over pictures of puppies, boats and landscapes. His big idea—a calendar where every month is illustrated with a famous disaster—is laughed out of the boss’ office.

These first few scenes establish a colorful sense of off-kilter life, similar to the mystery world Gondry directed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But when Stéphane retreats to his dreams, he makes that earlier movie look like stark realism. Stéphane sleeps so deeply and dreams so violently that it’s sometimes impossible to tell where we are, no matter where we are. Is he sleeping, and dreaming he’s at work? Or maybe he is asleep at work and dreaming of sleep, or maybe he sleepwalked to work, then fell into a deeper sleep and is now dreaming at home. It isn’t long before we are as totally lost and caught up in the disturbance of so much heavy dreaming. And likely, we are supposed to be. Occasionally, Gondry shows the audience what was really going on after a bizarre episode, but then he undermines these brief assurances with waking hallucinations, making it impossible to trust the moments of so-called “reality.”

These dreams can be extreme and fancy, but Gondry is smart to keep them grounded in real motivations. Sometimes it’s wish-fulfillment—Stéphane gets his revenge by dreaming that he kills the boss, nails the secretary and wins awards with his avant-garde calendars. Sometimes an anxiety is unveiled. But always at the root of Stéphane’s overactive mind lies the mundane stuff of conventional psychiatry, which is actually a nice cushion for the zany roller coaster this movie can become.

Gondry might be the only one, but he has things well under control for about two thirds of the movie. Then a gaping absence at its center grows more and more apparent. As Stéphane tries and fails at life, we are left to wonder why we’ve been invited along to witness his freaky mind. One begins to sense that perhaps Gondry has presented these unlikely scenarios for their own sake. It would have worked fine in an episodic TV program, but this is a one-shot deal. The great frustration of all dreams is that they go nowhere, but maybe movies about them should. LAA

Rated R; opens in select theaters Sept. 22.