Home > Metrospective

DVD review: 'The Science of Sleep'
Dream a little dream
By Clarke Reader
creader3@mscd.edu

The Science of Sleep 106 minutes $19.99

According to director Michel Gondry’s film The Science of Sleep, the borders between nighttime visions and daytime realities are fragile, brittle and subject to breaches.

The release of the film on DVD gives viewers a chance to not only watch this complex and layered film, but offers some fascinating insights into how this oddball of a movie was put together and how its surreal effects were achieved.

The film’s story focuses on Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal), a young artist who moves into his father’s old flat in Paris and goes to work in a mindless, menial post at a calendar factory. Instead of creating unique and vivid artwork for the calendars as he had hoped, he is stuck with small jobs that offer him no creative outlet.

The only place that his mind is allowed to run free is in his dreams, which are a surreal mix of humor and anger, bewilderment and clarity.

His dreams never really show him what he wants. Instead, his object of desire surfaces in the form of Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a beautiful young woman who moves into the apartment next to him.

What follows is an often bewildering but extremely tender love story. As Stephane’s dreams start to bleed into his reality, he begins to sort out his true feelings for Stephanie and to find a way for them to be together. But discerning dreams from reality becomes an obstacle for both Stephane and the bewildered viewer.

Of the other special features, the standout is a fascinating 40-minute documentary on the making of the film that spotlights how much of Gondry’s personal experience was used as inspiration. It turns out that many of the dream sequences came straight from the director’s dreams, and the locations were places in Paris where Gondry had lived and worked. The documentary gives the film an autobiographical angle that would be easily missed if one didn’t know to look for it.

The documentary also closely examines how the myriad of special effects were created, from an extremely realistic city made completely out of toilet-paper rolls to a fake ski slope for the actors to use. It may look cheesy and a bit unbelievable, but in a film in which dreams take center stage, that’s the point.

The Science of Sleep is not a generic love story by any means, but rather one that takes an in-depth look at emotions and characters. What Science suggests is a love that is possible in dreams, even if it fall short in reality. The film plays like the best type of lucid dream, a surreal, fantastic vision that boasts solid roots in both the waking and sleeping worlds.