Michel Gondry has an Oscar in hand for best original screenplay, for co-writing 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Next up for Gondry is a lifetime achievement award for best adapted reality.
Gondry’s latest project, “The Science of Sleep,” graces movie screens with his singular exploration of the melancholy border between real life and a daydreamed, better life. Much like an impressionist painter distorting light to make it more authentic, Gondry exploits his characters’ imagined lives for a more exact representation of everyday existence.
The result for these characters is often as sad and bleak as “reality,” but the reward for Gondry’s audience is immense: A poetic journey into the core of what it means to be human.
In “The Science of Sleep,” Stephane in Paris is a young man intimidated by the present and wounded by the recent past, determined to ignore both with childish exuberance. Gael Garcia Bernal (“The Motorcycle Diaries,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien”) plays Stephane with stupefying emotional and linguistic range – he must switch from buoyancy to petulance to despair, in French, English and Spanish, without warning.
Stephane is an inventive multimedia artist stuck in a numbing day job, pasting together business calendars for companies that actively disdain creativity. He spends his evenings in his cramped childhood bedroom, “inventing” time machines that go back exactly one second, or animating stuffed ponies that gallop through cellophane clouds.
Stephane hands a friend a pair of pasted-up sunglasses, saying, “You can see real life in 3-D!”
“Isn’t real life already in 3-D?” she responds?
Well, no, it isn’t, not according to Gondry. The monotony of adult responsibilities crushes most of us down to the two-dimensional, at best, for much of the day.
Stephane has trouble keeping his sleeping dreams separate from reality. In a piece Gondry returns to throughout the movie, Stephane narrates his dreams as a talk show host on a cheesy cardboard TV set. But Gondry does not believe in absolute connections between dreams and daily experience, so Stephane’s TV shows never help him sort things out. His life goes on as confused as ever.
Love is always one of those confusing factors in a Gondry script. Stephane stumbles upon a neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who seems a soul mate in more than name alone – she is also an artist, also wounded and reclusive, who spends her hours constructing elaborate collages and dioramas of found objects.
Both Stephane and Stephanie possess the eternal sunshine of an 8-year-old mind, unclear to themselves whether they want a schoolyard playmate or a sexual Playmate. They seek the comfort of companionship, then are repeatedly discomfited by the hormonal commands of biology.
Throughout, Gondry slips seamlessly between gray visions of wintertime Paris, Stephane’s dreams and nightmares, and whimsical daydreams apparently shared with Stephanie. This determinedly nonlinear filmmaking tells the story more accurately than cinéma vérité ever could.
The French-born Gondry makes us feel the beat regardless of whether we hear the words – he described his award-winning music videos this way, in a New York Times interview:
“I didn’t understand the English lyrics. So I looked at the rhythms, and I replicated an abstraction, which made my videos closer to what the musicians usually meant in the beginning.”
One of the characters in “Science” tells Stephane that regular people enjoy life, while “creative people” are always desperate to “leave a trace.”
Gondry may rest easy that his films burn an unmistakable path.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or at mbooth@denverpost.com; try the Screen Team blog at denverpostbloghouse.com.
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“The Science of Sleep”
R for language, sexual content, adult situations|1 hour, 45 minutes|SURREAL DRAMA|Written and directed by Michel Gondry, in French, Spanish and English, with subtitles; starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Miou-Miou and Alain Chabat|Opens today at area theaters.
