THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, 2006, France / Italy, 106 min.
Language(s): English / French
/ Spanish
(Subtitled)
Genre: Drama
Release Data: February 2007
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Director(s): Michel Gondry
What It's About: A perfectly realistic fantasy that explores the relationship of the dream world to our everyday logical existence. The starting point is the inner world of Stephane, a young man who arrives in Paris from Mexico to stay with his recently widowed mother. Adrift between the worlds of waking and sleeping, he is already confusing dream and reality when he is, literally, hit on the head by the neighbour’s piano. And so he meets Stephanie and falls in love. Stephanie has a charming strangeness that is at once seductive and a catalyst for the arising of doubt, jealousy and confusion. Their awkward flirtation produces no logical story-line, but rather a narrative that moves sideways as well as forward, revising and contradicting itself as it goes along. An approach that may be the only way in which to tell a love story, a narrative made up of memories, fantasies, projections and misperceptions whose cohesion does not conform to any conventional structure.
What to Look For: Note the director’s astonishing creation of a world in which time moves in moebius loops allowing both the obverse and the inverse of an occurrence to both be true at the same time. And, wonder of wonders, despite the disregard for linear logic, traditional film grammar and narrative coherence, his creation comes across as a perfectly realistic slice of life. Here, the real world and the dream world are brought to life with the same visual flare that the director employs in his Bjork and Beck music videos. And the playful yet magical effect is all achieved without reference to CGI and other high-tech sleight-of-hand.
Why It Matters: This is a movie that uses dreams to explore how our minds work in relationships. Stephane believes he has found a kindred spirit who shares the same world he does, but is this a love story of two people or of one? This young man is in love with love and so obsessed with his own world that details of the other are redundant. And yet, the divide of logical reality remains: he can’t see her in his dreams, and she seems to show little interest in forming the deep bond of a significant other. The fugitive, ephemeral quality of the dream-world is hard to remember, and so the story that seemed so clear in sleep, now seems labyrinthine in the clear light of day. In exploring how these two worlds might mingle this film defies the logic of a conventional plot-line. It is beautiful, complex and often humorous, but like others of this genre (Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, for example) you may want to see it more than once.
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