La Science des rêves (2006) - film review

After the death of his father, Stéphane Miroux leaves his home in Mexico and returns to Paris to live with his mother, whom he has not seen since he was a child.   His mother has found him a job with a company that makes calendars, but Stéphane is disappointed to discover that instead of designing calendars he is simply required to stick labels on them.  A highly creative individual who fancies himself as an inventor, Stéphane has a tendency to daydream and finds it easy to confuse reality and fantasy.  One day, he meets Stéphanie, his neighbour, and soon realises that he is in love with her.  At first, they get on well together, but when Stéphane hints that he wants to start a relationship with her, Stéphanie goes cold on him.  Unable to give up on the woman he loves, Stéphane resolves to make her his wife, but to do so he must give free rein to his imagination...

Michel Gondry goes into oniric overload for his third full-length film and gives the traditional French romantic comedy a whole new spin as he does so.  Gondry first came to prominence as a music video director and his penchant for visual storytelling is the defining characteristic of his work, particularly noticeable in La Science des rêves, a film that merges fantasy and reality to the point that often you cannot tell where one ends and the other takes over.   Gondry’s debut feature Human Nature (2001) was not widely well-received, but he garnered widespread acclaim for his equally off-the-wall follow-up, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).  La Science des rêves (a.k.a. The Science of Sleep) is a natural progression from Gondry’s previous films, a more daring attempt to break with film convention and explore the poetic possibilities of cinema art.  Despite its unusual composition, multi-lingual track and infantile sense of fun, the film proved to be both a commercial and critical success and has confirmed Michel Gondry’s reputation as one of the most innovative and fearless of today’s independent filmmakers.

The film begins as Gondry means it to continue, with a jokey intro which looks like a cruel parody of what you might find on one of the tackier satellite channels but which turns out to be the first in a series of recurring dreams in which the main protagonist Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) imagines himself inside his own head.  When we see Stéphane in the flesh, he is unhappily ensconced in Paris, trying to persuade his employer to buy his idea for a calendar in which each month is illustrated by a suitably grisly painting of a major human disaster.   Having narrowly evaded being crushed to death by a piano, Stéphane finds himself being tended to by his next-door neighbour (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who, as luck would have it, is named Stéphanie.  After that, the Gallic romance follows its usual convoluted course, amidst surreal interludes involving psychopathic electric razors, a town made entirely of corrugated cardboard and, best of all, a one-second time machine.   That Stéphane and Stéphanie are amorously interested in one another is obvious from the moment they simultaneously realise the artistic possibilities of discarded sweet wrappers.  The problem is that, for all their blazing creativity, they both find it impossible to express their most intimate feelings for one another.  The outcome is that Stéphane’s already tenuous grip on reality fractures completely and he becomes incapable of distinguishing his dreams from reality, which is odd as most of his dreams look suspiciously like a cheap children’s animated TV programme from the early 1970s.

Expressed in these terms, the film’s premise may sound ludicrously contrived and you might be forgiven for thinking that this is just another example of art house whimsy gone utterly berserk.  Far from it.  La Science des rêves is certainly one of the maddest films to have hit cinema screens in recent years but it deals intelligently and sensitively with some essential adults themes (the search for love and identity) and is a joy to watch - not only entertaining but also emotionally satisfying.   It helps that its male lead, the popular Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, has a magnetic presence and a detached, Byronesque quality that makes him perfect for the role of the quixotic dreamer Stéphane.  With his saturnine good looks and brooding persona, Bernal is perfectly matched by the equally alluring Charlotte Gainsbourg, who has the same quality of appearing slightly disconnected from reality.

La Science des rêves isn’t so much about two people falling in love; rather, it is about two people who are in love finding the means to express their feelings for one another - a subtle variation on a familiar theme.  Bernal and Gainsbourg are not only superlative actors (as this film amply demonstrates), they are both highly creative individuals and so it is apt that they should play opposite one another as creatives who can only communicate through the power of their imagination.  It is interesting that Gondry resists exploiting the obvious sex appeal of his two lead actors (apart from one cheeky nude scene) and instead makes more use of their childlike qualities.  Stéphane and Stéphanie are the proverbial orphans of the storm, two lost children who offer each other protection and consolation and who are in no hurry to grow up.  The childlike innocence with which Bernal and Gainsbourg play their scenes suggests that both of their characters are traumatised victims bearing the scars of earlier experiences, scars that will not heal until they each find their ideal love.

La Science des rêves is a welcome departure from the increasingly banal romantic comedies and dramas that prevail in cinema today.  Whereas most films directors these days are obsessed with the minutiae of real-life experiences, too eager to debase romance with love scenes that are virtually indistinguishable from pornography, Michel Gondry takes us off in the opposite direction, towards poetic abstraction, confident that the metaphor and the idiom can be as powerfully expressive in cinema as they are in literature.   Watching La Science des rêves is at first an unsettling experience, but it soon becomes a comforting one.  It awakens the child within us and reminds us how we once saw the world when we were young enough to believe it was a place of endless possibilities, unfettered by the deadening logic and order that we now, as adults, take for granted.  As unhinged as the film must appear with its psychedelic reality bending and recurring bouts of cardboard-constructed surrealism, it is hard not to be seduced by its naïve poetry, romanticism and exuberant sense of fun.   A cinematic oddity it may be, but La Science des rêves is also probably one of the cutest and most authentic French rom-coms you will ever see.

© James Travers 2012

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?