Sleepy Dreamer

You gotta hand it to him: Stephane Miroux (Gael Garcia Bernal, right) dreams of confronting his co-worker(Alain Chabat) in the Michel Gondry film The Science of Sleep. (Warner Independent Pictures)

Things have greater substance than people in The Science of Sleep. Hand-painted cardboard ski slopes, cellophane-water-filled bathtubs and cities made of toilet-paper tubes explode forth from the imagination of Stephane, a young artist who is much less palpable and glued together than his stuff. Having moved into his mother’s flat in Paris after his father’s death in Mexico — a tricky narrative justification for casting glinting Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, and also a good excuse to shoot in English — Stephane is adrift between the sleeping and waking worlds. “Stephane has always confused his dreams with reality,” says his mother (Miou-Miou), which is as good a description of twentysomething angst as any.

At night in his childhood bed, Stephane is the host of Stephane TV, where he holds friends and colleagues rapt while presenting his dreams, Emeril-style, from a set made of shower curtains and egg cartons. In daylight, Stephane works in a print shop gluing paper to paper, a numbing gig that makes sleep look like a much more exciting pursuit. No one at the office is interested in his art project, a crayoned calendar with a different disaster marking each month. But in the apartment next door to his mom’s, a lantern-jawed woman named Stephanie seems like she might get him — which, one assumes, would be a first for Stephane. How fortunate for this guy to locate that rare species of grown woman who spends her spare time making felt crafts. If these two hadn’t met, they might have had to harass kindergarteners for companionship.

Reality one-notch-over is the domain of Adaptation author Charlie Kaufman, one of the few screenwriters in the world who is also a brand (more American Apparel than Nike). When equally notched-up director Michel Gondry — best known for quirk-torqued Björk and Beck videos — directed Kaufman’s script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it might have been a whimsy overdose of the nose-bleeding, eyeball-lolling kind. (Many viewers didn’t survive their first joint venture, Human Nature.) But Eternal Sunshine was beautifully controlled, its cuteness slapped down by the profound universal sadness of a failed love story.

Now Gondry has ditched Kaufman, writing and directing The Science of Sleep all by his lonesome; many viewers will feel like they are back inside Kaufman’s well-trod, sticky synapses, anyway. Tone and technique — that giggling merger of the surreal and the everyday — are Kaufman-esque. Yet what’s more striking is how Science’s lead character resembles a Kauf man. (Or maybe Kaufman himself; it’s such a thin line.) Bernal as Stephane — like John Cusack as Craig in Being John Malkovich, or Jim Carrey as Joel in Eternal Sunshine — is yet another rash, unfocused boy-man completely out of touch with his desires. In its own hipster-nerd way, the Gondry-Kaufman oeuvre does more to explain the mystery of male desire than any women’s magazine article asking, What’s With Guys? These are men who lumber through life, insecure and destructive, galvanized by their pop fetishes in ways that are brutally unflattering, but somehow honest. Less truthfully, the Kaufman-Gondry boy-men are oddly crotchless, caught in films too precious to contain the carnal. They deal in a kind of impossible junior-high obsession, like the 12-year-old boy who loves the cartoon girl.

Horsing around: Stephane and Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) ride through Stephane's imagination. (Warner Independent Pictures)

Stephane is not immediately attracted to Stephanie; Charlotte Gainsbourg is a good casting choice, because hers is not an immediate beauty. In one glance, she is Mannerist delicate and trés sexy in a white sweater dress; then, in a blink she turns forgettable or downright Shrek-ian around the mouth. Though they are clearly soulmates — “Stephane, meet Stephanie” — Stephane first makes a play for Stephanie’s normal-beautiful friend, Zoe. (In his dream life, Stephane writes a best-selling book called I Am Just Your Neighbour and a Liar. By the Way, Do You Have Zoe’s Number?)

His is a slooooow awakening (Why Are Men So Slow?), but gradually Stephane realizes that he is in love with the girl next door. Sweetly, he builds a time-travel machine that snaps like a camera and goes backwards or forwards just a couple of seconds. What a great lover’s invention: a way to confront the fear of not doing anything at all by peeking into a near-future of possible embraces — or a way to go back and do it better the second time. Stephanie revels in Stephane’s inventor genius and happily collages alongside him — they do wonderful things with cotton batting — but playing isn’t love for her. She is fickle, sometimes impossible, and that makes her all the more attractive to him (Why Do Men Like the Difficult Ones?). We know very little about her, but then Stephane’s obsession has less to do with who Stephanie really is than with his own adolescent narcissism about who might — or might not — like him back. Love is just another one of his reality distortions.

Arrested youth is tiresome, though, and it is all too evident why Stephanie would hesitate to commit full-time to Stephane. Every carefully constructed moment of romantic awe — he makes her felt toy horse run; he makes her laugh — is met with a dozen moments of whining, groveling and complaining. Because Stephanie is so faintly sketched, The Science of Sleep never resonates in the emotional nerve centre that Sunshine did. It is a love story built for one: a boy in love with love. Gondry takes great and deserved pride in the glorious look of his anti-CGI, low-tech marvels; you can practically see the handprints on the sets. But the pull of the visual marginalia is so strong that the story becomes a backdrop to the backdrop. If Stephane is a victim of whimsy as pathology, so is the film.

The Science of Sleep opens Sept. 22 in Toronto and Vancouver and Oct. 6 across Canada.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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