Collegiate Times

Is it possible that when we sleep at night, we awake in another reality fully refreshed and ready to start our day? What if dreams are more than solitary, transient episodes ? what if they represent a completely interactive world that we visit every night and then wake up every morning with nothing but a hazy recollection of our experiences? In his latest film, ?The Science of Sleep,? Michel Gondry creates such a world and a character unable to keep these two spheres of reality from intersecting.

In this film, writer and director Michel Gondry does a masterful job of mixing a fantastical dream world with the blandness of reality. To do so, Gondry borrows a lot of thematic elements from his hugely successful (and equally experimental) film ?Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,? which earned him an Academy Award in 2004 for best screenplay. Essentially, he uses a romantic story as a vehicle to explore uncharted areas of the human mind: memory, dejavu and now ? dreams.

This film?s main character is Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal), a Mexican artist who has recently moved back to his hometown in France. Stephane suffers from a mental condition that makes it difficult for him to distinguish his dreams from reality. His insecurities and inability to cope with the real world causes him to seek solace in his dreams ? which over the course of the film spill increasingly into his waking hours.

As Stephane grows romantically attached to his neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), she becomes the object of his fantasy world. It becomes more and more difficult for him and the audience to differentiate between their relationship in reality and the one he constructs for them in his dreams.

Dreams are fleeting, ethereal experiences that can rarely be described with concrete terms. They are also very hard to capture with a video camera. A camera is simply a lens that captures real images in our world, and dreams by definition are unreal. The problem with the majority of dream sequences in films today is that they rarely serve as a window into a characters mind. Rather, they are usually simple reflections of the real world, skewed slightly by lens or color manipulations to clearly designate them as dreams.

In this film, Gondry doesn?t present a dream as a distortion of our reality; he presents it as an entirely original and elaborate reality of its own.

The magic of this film is rooted in the sheer novelty of its design and cinematography. Despite a relatively non-existent plot, Stephane?s dream world is a blank canvas for Gondry to be as creative and imaginative as he can be. He consistently creates dream sequences each more bizarre and visually stunning than the last. These dreams are colorful, elaborate and most of all ? surreal.

Gondry uses several different artistic mediums to create this dream world. Stephane?s fantasies are often presented in stop motion animation or claymation that meshes seamlessly with the real-life scenery. Like in ?Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,? Gondry achieves striking visuals by taking objects from the real world and placing them in dreams with extremely altered dimensions. Recurring objects in Stephane?s dreams include a toy horse that has come to life and an entire city made of paper mach?.

Roughly half the film is spent in Stephane?s dream world, and half is spent in reality. This creates a nice balance between comic, character-driven scenes in the real world and the technically complex scenes within Stephan?s mind.

This film, like Gondry?s other works, is sure to receive a mixed reaction from American audiences. It is one of those movies you either love or hate. It has a distinctly un-American feel to it, and it is rather weak on plot. Enjoying this film is more a matter of being able to appreciate the innovative thinking behind the perplexing script and peculiar cinematography. At the very least, this film is worth seeing for its courageous attempt to present in tangible ways a look into the inner workings of the human mind.

Director: Michel Gondry

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Running Time: 105 minutes

Rating: R

Show times: The Lyric Theater: 7 and 9:15

Grade: B+

Synopsis: Stephane is a shy and insecure young man who has trouble separating his dreams from reality. As he withdraws more and more into the security of his dreams, they begin to spill over into the real world ? threatening his romantic relationship with a beautiful neighbor.