I guess we could start with screwball comedy. The film vaguely resembles Annie Hall; albeit one rewritten by Tristan Tzara, directed by Luis Buñuel with sets and props by Joseph Cornell and Mike Kelly. And sure, throw Duchamp, Magritte, Beck, Breton and Dalà into the mix for good measure, but all this name dropping and genre marking simply ignores the singular talents of writer/director Michel Gondry. The Science of Sleep is charming, hilarious, poignant, sad, confusing, glorious, fantastical, inventive, mesmerizing, playful, hilarious, poignant, sad, goofy, silly, serious, beautiful, ethereal. It’s like pixie stix wrapped in cellophane, dipped in chocolate and covered with cloud fluff. This is the first movie Netflix has sent me that I will turn around and purchase. The commentary track alone is worth the price of admission. I love this movie. If I had been smart enough to drive the eight miles to Uptown, it would have been my best film of the year. This is why I like to watch; c’est mon dada.
this is a beautiful post, almost a prose poem. i loved reading it. i’ll put the movie at the top of my queue. you rock.
(where did you find all the accents? i’m always looking for accents, always too lazy to learn how to do them.)
pixie stix?
Pixie Stix!
the candy baron?
I’m a slave to authority, especially the candy colored man they call the Candy Baron. Eat your heart out Frank, but do so with neopolitan ice cream.
Well . . . Jeff–tell me more why you loved this? I didn’t. Didn’t hate it, and was impressed by many things–from Bernal’s and Gainsbourg’s often lovely performances, the supporting characters, many moments of visual fancy. But pixie sticks is all too apt an analogy; about 45 minutes in, I began to feel my teeth aching, and I kind of got a stomachache. (How about Pee Wee’s Big Adventure meets Modern Romance?)
That said–I’m not going to spend much time standing on my lack of rapture. I’m much more interested in hearing you (and others?) spelling out more of your pleasures in this text. A good review of a film I didn’t love almost always makes me more fond of the thing….
I don’t know . . . it just worked for me. It is an odd film but I liked how it wrapped a dark, somewhat despairing longing for something other than this world into a very playful and surreal vision of a life just outside the margins of the known. I had watched about 15 minutes late Saturday night but it was a bit much. So, I picked up where I left off on Sunday morning and found myself caught up in Gondry’s imaginative universe. Then I called for Nicola to come down and watch and for the next 90 minutes we simply enjoyed the film together, on the couch, in the basement, in the cold . . . while Cate played video games on the computer a couple of floors above. I loved Guy and the crazy short fellow with the fuzzy hair. I loved how the film moved back and forth from English to French with a little Spanish and, often, languages that don’t exist. I loved that Bernal’s character was a true social maladoit and by the end he is still. I loved the way I was never quite sure if I was in Stephane’s dream or his reality? I was overtaken by Gondry’s exuberantly imaginative flight’s of fancy. I thought Gainsbourg to be, as you mention, highly desirable, but also sad and awkward and insecure and uncertain. Pee Wee Herman was never truly lost but Stephane is a lost, sad, selfish, arrogant, angry, sweet and mournful character. I loved the lo-fi aesthetic coupled with the high-concept narrative. It made me smile a lot. And the song about kitties! Brilliant. I’m afraid I can’t spin into words what it is about the film that moved me as well as others are able to do on this site, but the idosyncratic pleasures of The Science of Sleep caught me totally by surprise. That’s the best I can do. While the pixie stix line was me being playful, there is nothing about this film that is too sugary. In fact, it made me sad.
I loved this film too.
I can see why Gondry would treat so lovingly these two creative weirdos, who relate to each other most completely when they relate on a creative level. They collaborate on art projects and they have fun; when they try to talk or otherwise understand their relationship, not so much fun for them.
I think I could say the same thing about my relationship with the film. Aesthetically, I’m in love and we understand each other When I try to explain the plot, I start to think there wasn’t so much new there.
I hear you both. Sometimes a movie just connects, swamping our ability to define the nature of its effectiveness. (For me, Breakfast on Pluto, Bottle Rocket, my long-lasting obsession with After Hours.) Maybe this is where I might be able to buy some notion of the “singular”… less a quality inherent to a given text than to a given viewer’s relationship with a given text?
Now that two folks have thrown their love into the ring, I am curious to see what Reynolds has to say about why the film doesn’t work, or does the sugary stomachache about cover it? I certainly remember how strongly you wanted to see the film back in the fall (I was the one who feared it would be too whimsical, maybe even eccentric to the point of frustration). Did you see it in the theatre or watch it at home on DVD? Were you by yourself late at night or with loved ones on a couch covered by blankets? Should any of that matter? Why might Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind be more successful/engaging than Science?
Okay, I’ll bite. I watched the thing at a comfortable distance from my significant other, who enjoyed the film a bit more than me, but occasionally looked over and asked, “Are you liking this?” We did not cuddle. (Eternal did sound those romance echoes; watching that film, for all of its tough attention to people failing in their love affairs, I was reminded of–and relished–my own intense commitment to K. More on that in a moment.)
Some of my detachment or dislike (of a minor form) is mere kvetching: Bernal was too damn goodlooking to be very convincing as a nebbish; he was quite strong at capturing the tics and personality, but I was constantly thinking, okay, but, c’mon. Bedhead does not make Gael Garcia Bernal seem less charismatically seductive, but rather more. I also found the fantasy riffs hit or miss, fetching or retching, and increasingly miss as the film wore on.
And here’s where my critique is both more substantive and sort of paradoxical. The first half seemed intent on disrupting the familiar narrative rhythms of rom-com or Mitty-figure-in-mundane-reality, and I relished the shaggy energy of the digressions and distractions. The noodling in animation, the dream-stuff, S & S’ work on the boat — such interludes seemed detached from the demands of plot, and worked on their own; a parallel track, or alternative, to the ‘central’ narrative, perhaps….
Yet the second half shifts into darker territory, as those flights of fantasy reveal Sebastian’s (as noted above) arrogance and awkwardness. Suddenly, the noodling seemed structurally determinate; the ‘plot’ seemed overdetermined in its use of fantasy. These weren’t digressions–they were central to the plot. Once the fantasies had that narrative purpose, I found them less engaging, or maybe I was less interested in exploring in them. (They meant, now, X: Sebastian was unable to form intimate bonds. Whereas in the first half, Sebastian’s imagination eluded precise interpretation.)
Hm. I could imagine this shift working damn well, but I found it jarring, disjunctive–and not in ways earned. And (back to Eternal‘s superiority) it struck me as a more adolescent sense of fantasy. (And–really–NO DIGS intended.) ESotSM struck me as an adult refutation of the rom-com ideal: hey, intimacy is hard and painful. Have at it. Whereas SoS seemed more familiar in its evocation of the boy-man whose approach to romance was so firmly trapped in his own fantasies…
But that’s kind of ungenerous. And as I noted in my first reaction: I just didn’t dig the film, but nor did I hate it. I am not sure my reaction is worth as much as the responses of you and Pony, who *got* the film’s sensibilities more than me….
Thanks for that analysis, Reynolds. Your division of the film into those two parts, based on those criteria you mention, really got to something fundamental about the way the film works. And I suspect that it’s that very problem that is at the root of a lot of people’s less-than-whole-hearted endorsement of the movie.
I wonder if a re-viewing of the first half’s fantasy sequences in light of Stéphane’s inability to form bonds (i.e. driven home only later as a function of the SECOND half’s fantasy sequence) would enrich the reading and possibly redeem the simple structure. Maybe not.
It might. Problem is, I’d almost prefer a more nuanced, complicated blurring of the problem across both halves–so that we always see Stephane’s dreams as both delirious escape and destructive avoidance….
And you’ll note I stopped screwing up and calling him Sebastian. Sorry!
The movie would have been better if his name had been Sebastian.
Perhaps, subconsciously, Reynolds believes so as well!
In response to Reynold’s disbelief that Garcia Bernal is too pretty to be believed . . . well, I think the Pony and I can agree that it’s difficult being beautiful . . . but such a fate doesn’t put a stop to the dark days nor the dark thoughts. To be charismatically seductive is something of a double-edge sword, but how can I explain that in mere words? Still, Stéphane’s neurosis seems well defined in the first part; he is a product of divorce, is still reeling from the death of his father, and suffers from a severe sense of cultural dislocation. Isn’t that why we get those dream sequences with dad, mum, the literal boy Stéphane (played by Gondry’s son, I think)? Still, I think you are onto something about the film’s internal logic, and I do agree that ESotSM is more satisfying (even if my time with Ruffalo, Dunst & Frodo pulled me out of the narrative on more than one occasion) in its ability to articulate the notion that intimacy between two people in love is difficult and painful work (and, sadly, often unfulfilling).
I do agree, Jeff. It’s very difficult.
i forgot to mention that sun hee and i watched this last week. i kept falling asleep–not because i disliked it (though it did verge on the precious from time to time) but because i was dog-tired. somehow this seemed like the appropriate mode in which to watch it, and i decided not to revisit it the next day even though i couldn’t even remember how it ended. well, that and i have this obsession with getting as many movies out of netflix in a month as i can.
sun hee liked it a lot more than i did–let us see if it will be possible to convince her to post about it.
We had the same reaction as reynolds and his significant other. Didn’t really enjoy it all that much, though we were engaged through to the end. There was an occasional glance at the other along the “are you enjoying this?” lines. About 3/4 the way through, I said “I want more Guy, Christine and Serge.” Guy is really terrific. He’s a throughly satisfying character and Alain Chabat gives a wonderful performance. Having said that, I was puzzled by the scene where he and Stephane toss his television into the river. I think (assuming this is reality and not one of Stephane’s dreams) the scene works to justify disengagement from the real world, and Stephane’s disengagement. But I wasn’t satisfied with this. What pisses Guy off is footage of, I think, a nurses’ strike. To be exact, what pisses him off is the commentator’s glib detachment from the events (demeaning the nurses with a crude joke). I identified more with the old woman “I know it’s trash, but you can’t throw the television in the river!” which I took to mean “I know the world is infuriating but you can’t retreat from it with some aestheticized gesture!” Trust me. She wasn’t saying “don’t litter.” She’s a smart old lady.
I think a film like Brazil does a better job at weaving together “fantasy” and “reality” in that it shows how strongly the latter tugs at us. I don’t think Sleep does that. I’m not sure if I’m being clear here, but reynolds’s comment seems right: this is a film about a boy-man trapped in his fantasy. Well, so is Brazil. But unlike Stephane, Sam Lowry knows that desire pulls him into the waking world as much it pulls him into his fantasy. And he seeks fulfillment, and gives into his desires, as much in the nightmare of waking life as in his boy-man comic book fantasy. Stephane wants to suck everyone and everything into his fantasy. It’s not that the guy is really sleepy. What he asks is way too much, and I think Gainsbourg’s Stephanie’s protests are too subtle. I don’t know if I’m being clear–I think reynolds is arguing something similar at the level of narrative.
Bernal is a joy to look at (“oh my god, he is so hot” said my wife during the very first shot–and I couldn’t get mad).
I also enjoyed the look of the film. Gondry is Melies. And you have to accept this if you are going to be able to give yourself over to him and get any satisfaction from his filmmaking. But as much as I want to take a trip to the moon, I also want to see the workers leaving the factory.