The Science of Sleep
I guess I have to say this first: I hate Charlotte Gainsbourg with a passion. I hated her in 21 Grams already where she negatively stood out, and here, she even plays the love interest! This is probably a very silly, personal thing, but ultimately it killed the whole film for me. Besides that, as expected, Gael García Bernal is pretty cute in this film, but doesn’t radiate as much as usual.
Enough of the complaining, actually the most influential and of the film is… Michel Gondry. Gondry is the best that could have happened to the film, but also the worst at the same time. All the aspects of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” are showing up in this film again: It’s so full of great ideas, creativity, little details and the stop-motion animation is just sweet beyond words – at the same time, it features the most awful characters and way too much pretentiousness for its own good. All those sequences between reality and dreams are a little bit too much for my tastes, the idiocy of the main character just hurt and the changes between weird french and the even weirder english felt extremely awkward to me. At least this story was more or less linear and clearer than “Eternal Sunshine”.
The end was so beautiful, I am glad that Stéphane finally realized her feelings for him. No matter whether they actually ended up together or not, it wrapped up everything quite nicely. Maybe leaving things open is another one of Gondry’s strong points.
Maybe I should also say a few words about the Paris in this film – in fact, this Paris is much less romantic and much more realistic than what you see in the long-gone Paris of “À bout de souffle” or the dreamy Paris of “Paris je t’aime”. The portrait of Paris actually is the only thing that is not overly pretentious in this film, it even seems like the director isn’t aware of this, haha.
Finally, for many reasons, it wasn’t really a pleasure to watch this film, and it was especially painful to write this review (don’t ask me why), but even then, I would recommend it – although I would not watch this film again, I think it was a worthwhile experience.