Movie Review: The Science of Sleep
Stars (Out of 10): 5
One Word Summary: Unfulfilling

       'The Science of Sleep” follows Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) who's returning to his childhood home at the plea of his mother. The creative and artistic job she promised him is instead mundane and mind numbing. But for Stéphane the real world has never been as beautiful or interesting as the world he sees in his dreams. He often has trouble differentiating between the two, and occasionally wakes up from an arduous night of dreaming more tired than when he went to bed. The world is boring and his dreams allow him to exercise the creativity that everyone else seems to mistake for strangeness. That is until he meets Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his next-door neighbor. It's this love that makes Stéphane's reality as interesting and unpredictable (both the good and the bad) as his dreams.

       I can't remember the last movie that I left both so confused and so unsatisfied. Like Kauffman, Gondry tells this story in a nonlinear way—Stéphane even has a time machine (unfortunately only able to travel one second forward or backward in time) to fully illustrate this point. Gondry takes it a step further, however, by sporadically switching languages among English, French and Spanish.

       All that's fine though. The ending is the problem. It's as if Gondry reached the end of a cliff, and instead of building a bridge to the other side, simply jumped off and called it his big finish. There are endings that leave themselves open to interpretation and there are endings that are lazy. This is the latter.

       The film's premise is pretty simple. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl says she doesn't love boy. To be honest, it sounds a whole lot like 'Eternal Sunshine,” but that's not important. The interest is in Stéphane's dreams, but that side of his character is underdeveloped. I thought at the beginning the movie was going to become a story of a his schitzophrenic-like pathology, but whether or not there's actually something wrong with Stéphane is never touched upon. The audience doesn't know whether or laugh at him or feel sorry for him after some of his misadventures.

       The dream sequences' visuals are cute, but at times they come off as cheesy, and at other times they just seem to be there to add weight to a movie that is light on real subject matter. Stéphane's dream station, where he films Stéphane TV, is a cool effect, but the scenes where he's swimming or riding Stéphanie's horse just look cheap. Gondry is a visionary, but in 'Sleep” his vision just seems to be misplaced.

The Bottom Line is that 'The Science of Sleep” is as brainy and inventive as its dreamer, writer/director Michel Gondry, whose previous credits include directing Charlie Kauffman's 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Unfortunately, 'Sleep” is incomplete and as unfulfilling as waking up in the middle of a good dream.