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Trailer for "The Science of Sleep"

If there’s been a more charmingly whimsical, beguilingly inventive feature film in the last decade than Michel Goundry’s The Science of Sleep, I can’t recall it. Goundry’s movie is, in a certain limited sense, one of the most visionary of recent years. It seems to have grown out of an artist’s preoccupations and fancies.

Goundry didn’t come to this film without some personal history in the cinemagraphically fantastic. He was the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature, both movies that involved excursions into altered consciousness and out of mundane reality.

This one is the first he’s made from his own screenplay (the other two were written by Charlie Kaufman) and it’s the result of ideas he’s been playing with for a long time. Indeed, some of the fabulated scenes and visual devices in the movie are said to have their origins in music videos and commercials Goundry did years ago. (And perhaps never have those two baleful marketing tools served more admirably creative ends.)

Goundry’s film follows the objective and subjective experiences of Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal), a young man of deeply imaginative artistic bent and accomplishments, over the better part of a year in Paris. Stephane has come from Mexico after the death of his father to be with his mother (Miou-Miou), who has obtained a job with a calendar publishing company for him.

Stephane’s drawings, constructions and strangely witty mechanical contrivances are closely related to his imaginative impulses and his unconscious. He’s an impressively clever youth, but he’s often out of synch, even at odds, with life as it’s daily lived.

Stephane has a richly evocative dream life, as we can see. In some of his land-of-Nod adventures he hosts an amusingly ridiculous approximation of a TV talk show where he discourses on “recipes” for dreams and introduces “guests,” including his father (“I’m sorry dad, but you’re dead”).

He has a rude awakening at the calendar company when he finds his new job is only a mundane paste-up position. Despite his disgruntlement he stays, even making friends with the three oddball employees. More hopefully, he’s attracted to a new neighbor, a woman with the unlikely name Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who rents an apartment across the hall from his flat.

Stephanie, a musician in a similarly oppressive employment grind, is receptive to his artistic wit and whimsy, but doesn’t take him seriously. When she realizes what’s on his mind, she’s disquieted by his fantasy-enriched, reality-avoidance approach to life.

Goundry hasn’t made a film that’s just reliant on his alluring fantasy sequences (done with some CGI but even more with models, animation, set tricks and film manipulation). His depiction of Stephane’s efforts to cope with life and love are humorous, but sympathetically so. For much of its length, Sleep is an offbeat romantic comedy, one with a vaguely, intermittently disturbing undertone. The movie also begins to be a portrayal of Stephane’s mental restrictions as well as his eccentrically appealing ingenuity. There’s even a muted subtextual implication about the not-always-happy relations between art and life.

It can hardly be surprising that Goundry hasn’t entirely succeeded in combining these ideas. What is surprising is that he brought it off as well as he did. Sleep is a little unwieldy. It’s kind of careless with some potentially important narrative elements, the apparently long-standing strain in relations between Stephane and his mother, for instance. (The great Miou-Miou is largely wasted.)

Bernal proves to be an unexpectedly funny and poignant performer (affects he didn’t need to muster as Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries), and Gainsbourg is sensible and winning as the object of the boy’s affections.

Goundry has poetically and dynamically exploited various possibilities of the cinema. His movie doesn’t work all the time, but it’s a lot more than an impressive toy or an airy-fairy self-indulgence. It achieves a sweet sadness.