The Science of Sleep

The romance and the comedy here are evident in a variety of ways, including a half-familiar (and amusingly scrambled) tale of young love and thwarted longing. And key parts of that giddy scrambling benefit considerably from the stellar presences and enchantingly offbeat performances of Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the two smart and attractive international stars playing the central roles of Stéphane and Stéphanie. A large part of the love story is told through the zany, eccentric dream visions of Stéphane, and director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind) invests much of the film’s creative energy in funky-surreal actualizations of those flaky fantasies. Those visions are ultimately the main story, as shared and overlapping dreams spark the romance and, perhaps, also end up hindering it. Perhaps the biggest pay-off of all comes from Gondry’s playfully whimsical fantasy visions. Cardboard fantasies and electronic phantasms share screen time and image space in his giddy, extravagantly flimsy mise en scene, with results that are almost always tenderly amusing and, sometimes, heartbreaking.