The Science of Sleep part 11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4mzJJX_XE&feature=related

Gondry tends to make movies for and about two kinds of people: sad-eyed boys with fantastic record collections, and the art school girls who want to make out with them. This one is no exception, packed as it is with references to indie bands and Russian animators, and goofy retro electronic toys, and fabulous-looking young people wearing the world's greatest homemade haircuts. The Science of Sleep is something like a Luis Bunuel film, but with politics replaced by fashion. It is, essentially, a hipster wet dream.

The Science of Sleep is not particularly effective story wise, and no, it doesn't match Eternal Sunshine in terms of emotional resonance. But it has its own charm. It will certainly frustrate those who want directors to essentially present them with neat little packages, fully contained narratives wrapped with perfect red bows. It's not an easy thing to comprehend, and it requires work, although like Gondry's last film, its convolutions would almost certainly benefit from repeat viewings. But I think those who miss the screenplay's uncanny ability to tightly structure its stories around a given non-linear gimmick are missing the point: The Science of Sleep structuring gimmick is that it doesn't have a structuring gimmick: what little narrative it has gets its potency from the fact that the thing is a glorious mess.

A wondrously baffling jigsaw puzzle where dreams and reality struggle to find a fit, The Science of Sleep is the dream you wish you could have, if you could only remember it. There is nothing straight forward about Michel Gondry's bizarre marriage of the conscious and the subconscious, in which two like souls are drawn by the magnet of their parallel thought patterns. It's crazy and funny, bewildering and confronting as Gael Garcia Bernal's Stephane's and Charlotte Gainsbourg's Stephanie literally and figuratively fall over each other through a confusion of languages, dreams and aspirations.

Viewers whose tolerance for shifting realities is quick to be tested by the frequent mixing of dreams and reality are best advised to either make a concerted effort to jettison their need for solid cinematic ground or stay away altogether lest they give themselves an aneurysm attempting to distinguish between the two, because in Gondry's strange universe the point isn't always tied so much to what world his characters currently inhabit as it is their reaction to that world.