Emotion Missing from Extravagant Sleep

When I first saw Michel Gondry’s “The Science of Sleep” back at the Seattle International Film Festival in June it left me scratching my head. When I took it in again at a recent press screening I was still scratching away, perplexed, amazed and dumbfounded by what I’d just re-encountered. The idiosyncratic filmmaker behind “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” has certainly made something fantastically unique here. The thing is, I’m not exactly sure being unique is enough.

The film revolves around Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), a would-be artist working at a dead-end job in a Parisian calendar company whose dreams constantly make their way into his waking life. He also has the hots for his next door neighbor Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a creative iconoclast herself who is both charmed and confused by her friend’s childish behavior. But Stéphane is undaunted, retreating more and more inside the world of his dreams in order to find a way to win this woman’s heart.

Trying to figure out what is real and what is fantasy is virtually impossible. Gondry bends the worlds of fact and fiction so frequently and with so much gonzo lunacy there is a good chance all 107 minutes of the feature is actually occurring deep inside Stéphane’s subconscious. As the film progresses it gets more and more difficult to find the line separating the two, all of it bleeding into one so completely I’m almost out of words trying to express the way it made me feel walking out of the theater.

This one just isn’t out there, it’s somewhere over the proverbial rainbow and Dorothy is sitting upon a cellophane cloud clutching Toto like he’s a coin purse waiting for the stop-motion pony to run across the water and whisk her back Kansas. While Gondry’s imagination cannot be questioned, his ability to juggle it while also crafting an interesting and emotionally intriguing storyline certainly is. Without Charlie Kaufman to work with, the characters inhabiting his movie are as paper thin as the cardboard tubing running through Stéphane’s dreams.

Frankly, I got lost. This thing is all over of the map and Stéphane and Stéphanie’s is-it-gonna-happen-or-not romance is never fleshed out well enough for a person to get a chance to care about either of them. This movie is so hopped up on wonderment it completely forgets to include the intimacy, characters blindly searching for love for themselves when it is virtually impossible feel any for the ones seeking it out.

But golly is it all eye-popping! Gondry, an acclaimed director behind some of The Beastie Boys most stunning videos and a talented writer who picked up an Oscar (along with Kaufman) for writing “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” lets his own imagination completely run wild. Some of this we’ve seen before in his videos, most of it we haven’t, and all of it is done in a way completely original and brilliantly one of a kind. It’s stunning, take-your-breath-and-make-you-gasp-for-air stunning, and no matter how worldly you think you are I assure you there are things creeping out of the corners of this you absolutely, certifiably have never seen before.

It’s just so awful, then, that the people are so lifeless and impossible to care about. I got the feeling that without a co-writer working with him Gondry became so obsessed with his whack-a-doo visual ideas he completely forgot to give his picture any heart. Sure Stéphane’s tale is interesting, and of course with an actor as glorious as Bernal playing him you can’t help but feel for the guy (if only a wee little bit), but at a certain point I almost wanted to shout at the little bugger to get over it and tell him to dial up psychiatrist.

It doesn’t help that Gainsbourg might be playing one of the single most uninteresting women in the history of surrealistic romantic fantasy. She’s a wooden mannequin either posing prettily in her drab couture, smoking like an anorexic supermodel or giving wide-eyed looks of amazement towards her neighbor’s whimsical shenanigans. She’s got nothing to play and, worse, nothing to do, Gondry continually leaving the talented actress stranded without any way to make anyone, particularly the audience, interested in her.

Listen, I love Gondry. Heck, I gave his last two picture four stars and I’ll tell you right now “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” is a guaranteed lock to make my ten best list at the end of 2006. Of all the great directors working today he is right at the top of the ones I would race out and see their picture no matter what it is about or how much it would cost to do so. But this one just doesn’t cut it, and no amount of flawlessly executed razzle-dazzle could get me out of bed to see “The Science of Sleep” again.