Kritiken

...If only love were so straightforward in this unhinged, papier-mâché fantasyscape Gondry created, but it isn't, and though they have a few idiosyncratic dates, the chemistry between Stephane and Stephanie only exists in the dreamworld of a troubled man. The story exists here in the lack thereof; the narrative is both sideways and forward––it parallels and then contradicts itself––just like the puerile fascinations of its protagonist.

Gondry's freeform approach can teeter on indulgent meandering, and if there's any charge to raise against the film, it's that his own adolescent curiosity obstructs his ability to tell a cogent narrative. But like Stéphane, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP is too damn charming to ever denounce, and though the film is often sentimental, an ambiguous, bittersweet ending saves it from feeling hackneyed.

In the hands of anyone else, this could have been excruciating, but I found it thoroughly delightful: idealistic and romantic: a thwarted love story that does not trade in the degraded cliches either of romance or conventional sexiness.

Proving that you can razzle the retina without busting the bank, the kaleidoscopic visuals never overwhelm the sweet, screwball relationship between graphic artist Gael Garcia Bernal and his new neighbour Charlotte Gainsbourg, who conjure more chemistry than a thousand Hugh and Drews.

Like most dreams, the film is all-encompassing and often powerful in the moment, but quickly fades when you wake up, leaving you wondering what Gondry’s decision to fuse Stéphane’s reality with his dreams actually allows beyond a flush of heady romance and wild imagination. Still, in the moment, Gondry and Bernal almost manage to give quirky a good name.

Gondry is not just a nutsophile, though. Underneath his Blue-Peter-presenter-with-a-budget stylings beats a big, unashamedly romantic heart, and it is this that makes the film work. For a director who initially seems to be all about the surface, Gondry has a delightful ability to make the tiniest moments of a relationship feel wholly real and intimate.

Gondry must venture beyond his self-absorbed creative realm if he's to advance as a film-maker. The Science of Sleep is possibly a very shallow work, but it's also exhaustively imaginative and bustles with wit and invention.

Although the diminutive (5-foot-6-inch) Bernal emanates an infectiously playful and energetic charisma, there comes a point when you just want to slap him with a big hand for being such a petulant baby. There’s 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.

“The Science of Sleep,” for all its blithe disregard of the laws of physics, film grammar and narrative coherence, strikes me as perfectly realistic, as authentic a slice of life as I’ve encountered on screen in quite some time.

Kaufman’s script gave Eternal Sunshine a universality that the intimately autobiographical Science of Sleep lacks. The stakes here are lower, since Stéphane and Stéphanie’s halting love affair feels like their love affair, not a template through which each viewer can read his own romantic past. But, like Eternal Sunshine, this movie understands something about the way lovers develop their own language, their own mythology, and, finally, their own pathology.

This is the first Michel Gondry film that feels completely born of the pop magpie’s own imagination—fabulously homegrown and devoted unpretentiously to an oddball way of looking at and appreciating the world and the people who run through it, a blissfully cluttered vision instantly and affectionately recognizable from Gondry’s groundbreaking music videos for The Chemical Brothers, Foo Fighters, Kyle Minogue, Massive Attack, and Björk.

A madcap surreal comedy set in Paris and shot in English and French, it doesn't have the emotional impact of his last film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind but its delirious inventiveness and determined good nature give it a unique appeal.