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Swimming
through his own dreamscape: Bernal in The Science of
Sleep.
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Leaky
Surrealism
By
Ann Morrow
The
Science of Sleep
Directed
by Michel Gondry
For Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the collaboration
between self-obsessed yet astute screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
and French video artiste and romantic obsessive Michel Gondry
resulted in one of the most luminously original and daringly
emotive love stories of recent years. In it, two mismatched
former lovers (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) have their memories
of each other erased, and subsequently become attracted to
each other all over again. The film’s piñata-like heart is
burst open by the unlikely chemistry between Carrey, as an
average guy who is swept off his sneakers, and Winslet as
the dippy punk chick who turns his ho-hum life topsy-turvy.
But it’s their largely subconscious narrative that makes the
film memorable, and that story could not have been told without
director Gondry’s extraordinary visual imagination.
The
Science of Sleep is Gondry’s first solo feature, and it
mines a comparable romantic territory. Stéphane (Gael García
Bernal) is an introverted young artist who becomes attracted
to his neighbor, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), an aspiring
textile artist. Instead of traveling into the subconscious,
the film explores the spillover from dreams—both the waking
and sleeping kind—into “real life.” Alone in his apartment,
Stéphane fantasizes that he’s the host of his own TV show,
in a studio imagined out of cardboard. He takes a job at a
low-budget calendar company, and has outrageous dreams of
wrecking havoc on his co-workers, who do not appreciate his
surrealist paintings of plane crashes and other disasters.
In one puppetry-styled dream, an old electric razor grows
tarantula legs and attacks his boss. As he falls in love with
Stéphanie, the borders between his various dream states dissolve.
Gondry’s visuals are mischievously inventive—especially the
recurring use of cellophane for water—but tend to be overly
thematic. Instead of using photogenic absurdity to augment
the story, which he did brilliantly in Eternal Sunshine,
Gondry has an artistic agenda that is noticeably preplanned
(around cardboard, cellophane, and felt). As Stéphane’s relationship
with his cautious neighbor fitfully progresses, his mechanically
old-fashioned inventions (he gives her a telepathy helmet,
and she charmingly pretends it works), and the objects of
his dreams become less machinelike and more tactile, culminating
with a galloping cloth horse (featured in the movie’s promo
posters). Similarly, his linguistic shifts between Spanish,
French and English are calculated for the occasional bit of
cleverness (“I’m schizometric!”).
The relationship between the two artists is blandly bittersweet:
Stéphanie is as grounded as a rutabaga, and grows increasingly
apprehensive as Stéphane’s eccentric attentions become more
crazed. He confides in despair to a co-worker: “She changed
the exact second I started to like her. I wish we could go
back to when I didn’t think she was pretty.” That’s the best
line in the movie; the lack of Kaufman’s verbal brio is Gondry’s
most noticeable failing as an auteur. The zany antics of Stéphane’s
bored co-workers are marred by their course and uninspired
repartee, as is Stéphane’s wooing of his neighbor. He’s supposed
to be a social nincompoop, but as countless romantic underdogs
have proven, bumbling a seduction with inept compliments is
a great opportunity for a snappy writer. Stéphane’s crudity
following a whimsical shared moment with Stéphanie—they use
cellophane from the faucet to douse a flaming doll-man on
the street—falls especially flat. It doesn’t help that Bernal’s
(familiarly) boyish zeal is dampened by Gainsbourg’s characteristic
naturalism.
Had The Science of Sleep been directed by an auteur
of lesser expectations, it could be viewed as an amusing and
slightly poignant trifle. But arriving as it did in the brilliant
glow of Eternal Sunshine, it’s a likely candidate for
most disappointing release of the year.
Animal
Crackers
Open
Season
Directed
by Roger Allers and Jill Culton
Sony Pictures’ offering to the world of kiddie animated flicks
proves to be a visually striking, if narratively pedestrian,
rehash of a dozen other movies in which animals talk, cavort
and generally make mincemeat of that inferior intellect known
as human. As in hunter.
Boog (Martin Lawrence) is a, er, cuddly grizzly, who has been
raised since his rescue as an orphan cub by goodhearted Ranger
Beth (Debra Messing). Their cute “animals are our friends”
show at the park is ruined when Elliott (Ashton Kutcher),
a one-antlered buck, shows up, ostensibly to rescue the very
mild-mannered Boog from domesticity. Earlier, the bear had
untied Elliott from the hood of a pickup owned by Shaw (Gary
Sinise), the meanest, dirtiest, worstest hunter that ever
lived. One look at Shaw’s ramshackle shack, later in the movie,
gives us all the proof that we didn’t need that this guy is
evil; he has taxidermed just about all manner of animal species,
right down to the bottom half of a skunk. When Boog, and Elliott,
are returned to the wild, Shaw follows in hot pursuit, bent
on revenge. Too bad for the critters that all this happens
right as the park’s three-day “open season” for hunting begins.
The movie has some genuinely creative, often hysterical moments,
including one that, believe it or not, involves deer scat
that paradoxically is as refreshing as it is, well, yucky.
Lawrence and Kutcher do an amiable take on the Myers-Murphy
shtick from Shrek, by way of the Goodman-Spade patter
from The Emperor’s New Groove, and so on. There’s a
refreshing lack of catering to the supposedly hipper parent
element in the audience, other than the aforementioned PC
overdrive with respect to all things hunter. The animals have
their day, with sly nods to Braveheart, courtesy of
a Scottish-brogued squirrel (Billy Connelly), and the inventiveness
that the filmmakers use to depict just how this comes about
is fairly clever. Best of all, the visuals are lush and tactile,
from the coarseness of Boog’s fur to the liquidity of roaring
whitewaters.
—Laura
Leon
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