by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

While it has a comparably caustic spin on romance, and elasticized regard to reality, The Science of Sleep doesn’t benefit from the sort of inspired and wildly unpredictable script with which screenwriter Charlie Kaufman armed director Michel Gondry for his first two feature films, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s Gondry’s first feature from his own script, and proves that the strengths of the French wunderkind of music videos (Björk, White Stripes), advertising and most recently cinema remain firmly in his inventive and original notions as conjuror of moving images.

Gondry’s playful, polyglot, partially autobiographical comedy has talented but socially stunted graphic artist Stéphane (played gleefully by Gael Garciá Bernal, Mexican cinema’s international-award magnet) moving to Paris at his French mom’s behest, and brewing up a crush on his geeky neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The pair’s cautious, bumbling mating dance is stymied by Bernal’s complicated personality—sweet and exuberant one moment, sullen or aggressive the next—and difficulty in discerning between real life and the vivid realm of his dreams.

Dreams, finally, are what The Science of Sleep is about (a spinoff Web site, www.howdoyoudream.com, invites visitors to post recollections of their own). It’s telling that Gondry fashioned most of the animated sequences of the film before the script was anywhere near completion, and thus had to write around them. He truly shines in taking what are tremendously idiosyncratic and irrational flashes of brain activity, collisions of the poignant, the ridiculous and the mysterious, and presenting them in a manner that is comprehensible and fun. Moreover, he does so with a deliberate preference for crude materials and archaic techniques—Stéphane’s “flight” over the cardboard-and-poster-paint Paris of his dreams was accomplished by tossing Bernal in a water tank with the cityscape back-projected. In other words, while Gondry has certainly wowed with high-tech trickery in some of his videos and ads, it’s clear that his heart, and the charm of his film, lie with the lo-fi and handcrafted. That the tale Gondry tells is but a workmanlike clotheshorse, on which to dangle his crafty visual concoctions, doesn’t mean the viewer can’t ride it comfortably to its conclusion.

The Science of Sleep opens Friday, Sept. 22

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