The Science of Sleep
There’s an Ann Coulter line known by most people who never bothered to read her books. It’s not a coincidence that it’s on the first page of How to Talk to a Liberal, because it’s the first line that we read when we’re standing in a bookstore and decide we want to remind ourselves of how crazy she is, read the first page, and promptly put the book back on the shelf where we found it. It goes something like this: ““Traditionally, the way to change a liberal is to make him move out of his parents’ basement and start paying taxes.”
I roll my eyes every time I hear that line, but it was something that popped into my head as I watched The Science of Sleep. The main character, Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), suffers from such blind artistic idealism and has such a child-like demeanor that one has a hard time building empathy for his sorry situation as he seems unwilling to help himself. He digresses into such childish behavior that we have to actually struggle to root for him to get the girl, and instead we can’t help from thinking, “Grow up already,” in a way that would make Ann Coulter (may she rot in hell) proud.
The Science of Sleep is what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would have been if Michel Gondry hadn’t been hindered by Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay. And I use the word “hinder,” in a positive way, because Kaufman gave the story just enough structure so that Gondry’s directing style worked to enhance the surreal effects while at the same time create a realistic relationship between the two protagonists. But in this movie, Gondry is both screenwriter and director, and from the very beginning the cohesiveness of the story is fickle at best.
Stéphane is an artistic individual who is conned into moving back home by his mother, who has tricked him into taking a job with a calender publisher, because for some reason he thinks the company will allow him to publish his economically infeasible art called Disasterology (art work that pictures disastrous things happening). We learn that his father has just died, but Gondry decided that this was not an important theme to exploit and bring to the forefront of the plot, rather it comes up a few times in the movie but never enough so we can see how it resonates within Stephane’s life. One day when he’s on his way out the door to go to work, he’s crushed by a piano falling down the stairs and then whisked into the apartment of a woman named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who comes to his medical aid along with her friend Zoé (Emma de Caunes).
Romantic interest blossoms within Stéphane, but not for the obvious girl. Rather than choosing Stéphanie, who is artistic and sometimes eccentric like Stephane, he first turns to her friend Zoe, despite the fact that she openly mocks him and has nothing in common with him. In fact, the only thing that could be said for her is that she’s the more conventionally attractive of the two, which simply highlights Stephane’s own hypocrisy: He pretends to have too much artistic integrity to lower himself into doing grunt work for his calendar company, but at the same time is wholly superficial in his romantic interests.
Anyone who has watched the trailer knows that Stephane often retreats into his own dreamworld, and though we’re first led to believe that this only happens when he’s asleep, as the movie progresses we find out that he can fall in and out of his dream state while being wide awake. As can be ascertained with a little bit of logic, the movie quickly becomes confusing as we are unable to separate dreams from reality. And perhaps this is quite fitting, because Stephane suffers from the same predicament.
His dream world is aesthetically pleasing, reminiscent to claymation models used in old SciFi movies. The television studio from which his dreams are broadcasted comes with video cameras made from cardboard and uses empty egg cartons for walls. The doorway that acts as a portal into the dreams is a clear plastic shower curtain, and everything has a 70s Austin Powers feel to it with Gondry’s choice of strong color. The whole setting feels like a mixture of an Erector Set and the Mouse Trap board game, in that it’s transparently mechanical.
The main problem with the movie is that rather than building the imagery around the plot, the entire movie seems built around the imagery. There’s no doubt that Gondry is artistically brilliant with the props and setting he uses, but he often sacrifices characterization by sending Stephane into his surreal dreams, and without the characterization we’re unable to feel the connection between him and Stephanie.
There are times when the movie is genuinely funny, with real laugh out loud moments. Stephane eventually comes around and pursues Stephanie, but every time he comes even close to getting her, he acts immaturely or does something to creep her out and then he’s back at square one again. Eventually, we stop caring whether or not she’ll ever be with him, and after he blows his last chance with her by not bothering to show up on a date, we actually hope that she doesn’t accept the torture of bringing him into her life.
By the last scene, he has lost all his child-like charm, and we literally watch him throw a tantrum because he doesn’t get what he wants, hiding up in Stephanie’s bed and refusing to climb down when she pleads with him to do so.
In most romantic movies of this sort, the director should have us hoping that the guy gets the girl, but in this case there is no such comradery. Though the movie is an interesting foray into the structure (or lack thereof) of dreams, there’s not enough of a tether to keep us going along while the plot derails into Stephane’s surreal world. And when the ending credits begin to roll, there’s this feeling that closure hasn’t been reached, that any semblance of denouement was skipped over because of ambiguity and Stephane’s childish resistance to change.
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