The Stuff Of Dreams

Michel Gondry, visionary director of 'Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind' and countless groundbreaking music videos (including the White Stripes' Fell In Love With A Girl, realised completely in Lego), returns with 'The Science Of Sleep', his first feature as writer and director. If 'Eternal Sunshine' was a bit too weird for your tastes, be warned, 'Science...' sees Gondry really cutting loose with the mad visuals. Where 'Eternal Sunshine' was polished, 'Science...' is rough around the edges, more about capturing a series of moments than telling a story with a beginning, middle and end. Centring on Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal), a young man who finds it difficult to differentiate between dreams and reality, the film tells a kind of love story, but much of the action takes place in 'Stephane TV', a cardboard-constructed studio inside Stephane's head, that serves as a netherworld between sleep and dreams. If it sounds odd, that's understandable, but to attempt to explain any more would do an injustice to the magical world that this film successfully creates. It's safe to say that you won't see anything else like it at the movies this year.

The creation of an animated dream-world was Gondry's motivation for telling this story, as he explains: "We shot all the animation first, creating the dream world before we began shooting the film. During the shooting, I had to work around the dreams, rather than the other way around. It made the film more interesting, because it wasn't done in the typical way where the dreams follow the arc of the story." It's not hard to see the potential pitfalls of this method, and the film will certainly not be as universally praised as 'Eternal Sunshine'. The story is confusing, and Gondry is not as gifted a writer as he is a visualist. But although he may make more satisfying films in collaboration, his reasons for working alone on 'Science...' ring true; his limitations helped him achieve what he desired: "I wanted my instinct to be more in control and my intellect to be less so, allowing me to have ideas, images and concepts without having to justify why."

Though some audiences may lose patience with the film's wandering narrative, to the patient viewer it offers a spellbinding cinema experience, made with an eye for pulling the wonderful out of the mundane. Holding it all together is Bernal's perfectly pitched performance. As in 'Motorcycle Diaries' and 'The King', he employs his ability to suggest an interior life that is sometimes at odds with exterior action. Stephane is a contradictory personality, one moment childlike and pitiful, the next vulgar and nasty. But rather than giving a sombre and introspective performance (like Jim Carrey in 'Eternal Sunshine'), Bernal brings lightness, and lots of humour, to the part. It works to create a human centre that audiences can cling to in the midst of Gondry's sometimes overpowering surrealism. For those adventurous enough to try, 'The Science Of Sleep' is a trip worth taking.