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October 05, 2006

The Science Of Sleep

The chronology of my attempt to write about The Science Of Sleep begins over a month ago, as I become hooked on the trailer at around the same time I receive the notice for the first press screening later that week. Then I see it, and fully plan to write about it that very night; but somewhere between being awkwardly awestruck by the relation of the closing shot to the film that had come before it and stirring up some dreams of my own, my critical plans are sidetracked. Then I wake up and get a flat tire and run down the highway and go to LA to take care of some business. Shortly after returning, I decide I had better watch Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind again before fully organizing my thoughts. I do so, and manage to write about that, and then go off to shoot a music video before providentially receiving an invitation to another screening of the film, which I decide to wait until before expanding any further on the few sentences I've by this point managed to jot down.

And so, predictably, I end up here, faced with what has in my mind expanded into not simply an unwritten review of Michel Gondry's new film but an examination of the relation of dreams to cinema, in terms of both narrative device and the medium's psychological makeup, the collision of silver hallide and the cerebral cortex. I'm excited by the challenge I've set for myself - excited, and also prematurely exhausted by the mere thought of all that typing and thinking and explicating; I think I'll take a nap first. Why do I want to not write about this movie?

Because I do, of course (if on a slightly less extensive level); I'm just plying my part time trade as a self styled defeatist. Much like Stephane in this film, I have a tendency fabricate my own foregone conclusions.

The Science Of Sleep is a deceptive bit of whimsy; it often feels light as a feather, but has undercurrents which run deeper and darker than the romantic melancholy which made Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind so affecting. This is Gondry's first attempt at working off his own script, and while the result isn't as well written a film as his collaboration with Charlie Kaufman, it is hardly the lesser for it.

Unlike Eternal Sunshine or Gondry's more famous music videos, which can be mind boggling in their visual and narrative complexity, Science is exceedingly simple. It is a romance relayed partially through the dreams of its protagonist, Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) which might initially suggest that Gondry, talented visualist that he is, is taking the easy way out; that he's creating a cushion of surreality and stitching a narrative together out of dream sequences.

The cinematic dream sequence in general is, more often than not, an empty device; it's rarely used for much more than visually indulgent exposition - or for visual indulgence, plain and simple. More rewarding, when done correctly, is dream logic. There are theorists who posit (correctly, I think) that cinema is a medium which in its very essence approximates the nature of dreams; but on a less inclusive level are films like Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Altman's Three Women, many of Bergman pictures and most of Bunuel's, which all have as their narrative engine an innate trust of subconscious process. Eternal Sunshine, although it was about memories, had a similar chemical sensibility.

As it turns out, however, The Science Of Sleep is neither a dream of a movie nor a movie about dreams. It's a romantic comedy, almost as straightforward as it is idiosyncratic, and if it has an innate sense of anything, it is of the neurotic ups and downs of that grey area between a crush and a relationship. This terrain is extruded by Gondry's dream sequences, but not superseded by them. While there are a few traditionally delineated trips to slumberland, just as frequent are the instances where the gloves are off, where fantasy and reality infringe upon each other. It would be easy (and, certainly, not at all off the mark) to assign to the film the affliction of its hero: the structure of the script reflects Stephane's mindset; both confuse dreams with reality. But what such a semiotic reading fails to encompass, and what makes the film so unique, is the haphazard subjectivity of this malady - or, in other words, the sloppiness of Gondry's script, which rescues the film from the strict constraints of a pychoanalytic portrait and turns it something sweet and simple. From Gondry's perspective, nothing is more romantic than a boy and a girl who can share a moment of mutual surreality. But there's something dangerous about it, too, and what's fascinating about the film is the way Gondry undermines his genre to such an extent that, by the ostensibly happy ending, Stephane cannot get the girl; and in doing so, he incriminates himself.

(At this point in the review, I feel like I should mention that it's been several days since I started writing this thing; the paragraph above has gone through about ten different permutations, most written intermittently while loading footage; the sun is currently coming up; it's the first time on the set we've shot for more than thirteen hours; and once again, I really feel like going to sleep.)

The turning point for Stephane, and for the film, occurs after he has set a coffee date with Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his next door neighbor and the longstanding object of his affection. He's walking down the street, and, slightly nervous, begins to consider the possibility that she might stand him up. Perfectly understandable - except that Stephane cannot distinguish between subconscious suggestion and actual realization, and thus manages to convince himself that she is, in fact, not there, that she has stood him up, that she does not care one whit for him. He turns, hurt and rejected, and stomps back down the cold Parisian streets while, around the corner at the cafe, Stephanie finishes her coffee and checks the time and checks the time again.

Narratively, Gondry lets this function as a traditional end-of-the-third-act romantic setback, but the actual implications of it are impossible to ignore. In his review of the film, Jim Emerson writes that there is "definitely something unheathly, even pathological, behind Stephane's notion of this asexual/heterosexual "'relationship.' The boy is charming, but not quite as charming as Gondry thinks he is." I don't think that's the case, and I think Emerson is missing an important point even after caling attention to it: Stephane is a little bit sick in the head. In the real world, he might be categorized as a schizophrenic. Gondry doesn't make a point of this, but neither does he ignore the real world repercussions of Stephane's delusions, and as the film progresses and the fantasy sequences begin to lose their lightweight sense of whimsy, one can begin to discern a distinctly autobiographical tint to the proceedings.

(Another shooting day down. Fourteen hours this time. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel - there are only two days until we wrap for good, and we've had to stop pushing shots to pick up later. For some reason, though, I'm wired. I passed up a chance to see this film for a third time the other day because I wanted to get some work done on this music video I'm working on - it's supposed to be due on Sunday and I've only just now finished the first effects shot. Something's gotta give.)

Gondry has always borrowed wholesale from his own subconscious. Anyone who has read some of his recent interviews - his recent New York Times Magazine profile, for example, or Sean Axmaker's interview at Green Cine - or watched the documentary, I've Been Twelve Forever, on Gondry's Director's Label DVD, will be able to connect many of the Freudian dots in The Science Of Sleep, some of which are motifs developed in his music videos (the giant nightmare hands that have haunted him since his childhood, for example), others being more literally biographical and more exclusive in their intimacy; there's something of an ode to a lost love here, and while the film is not apologetic in tone, there's the sense that Gondry intends it to serve, at least in part, as a private apologia.

Regardless of whether Gondry, like Stephane, really is too engaged with his own imagination to function in a relationship, he certainly his a maturity and perspective his protagonist lacks. The final twenty minutes of the film are stripped of just about every trace of visual trickery, relying instead on what in this case might be the most unexpected special effect of all - some really brilliant writing. Over the course of the last reel, Stephane and Stephanie hash out their feelings, she tearing down his pretenses as fast as he can build them up until they both wind up in bed, emotionally exhausted, far past the point of recovering any semblance of a romantic relationship. Stephanie ends the film at her side, but there's something very maternal about the manner in which she avails herself to him. Considering the fact that Stephane, at the beginning of the film, moves back home to his childhood home in his mother's apartment, only to find that his mother isn't there, that he winds up in Stephanie's arms not as a lover but as a lost little boy.

(There's no question that this film struck a personal chord with me. Ever since I can remember, my mom has saved cardboard tubes and boxes for our art projects. My dad and I used to build massive cardboard castles in our basement, and paper towel tubes made excellent turrets. Now the 'box box,' as we've always called it, is in my brother's room - which is adjacent to the room I moved back into when I returned home. What I'm wondering here, essentially, is whether cardboard equals heartbreak. In a manner of speaking.)

(I've had to change the authored-on date of this entry more times than I can remember. Only one day of shooting left!)

Posted by David Lowery at October 5, 2006 01:07 AM

Comments

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