Lucid Dreaming
by Chris Dashiell

The Science of Sleep, the new film by Michel Gondry, displays a childlike fascination with dreams and fantasies, along with the more grown-up concerns of romantic love and obsession. The movie resembles a strange and beautiful little animal with unpredictable behavior, making you laugh one minute and upsetting you the next.

Gael García Bernal plays Stéphane, a young Mexican artist who comes to France after the death of his father, staying at the apartment house owned by his French mother. Stéphane has trouble distinguishing his waking life from his dreams. One of the film’s recurring motifs has him hosting a dream TV cooking show where he plays all the instruments, interviews guests, and creates dreams out of various ingredients. In his real life, his new job at a calendar company introduces him to a group of eccentrics who end up playing roles in his dreams (the company president doesn’t take kindly to his idea of a calendar celebrating the great disasters of history). Stéphane also likes to create unusual art objects using household materials, and when he meets his next-door neighbor Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), he discovers that she shares his surrealistic interests. Stéphane isn’t initially attracted to Stéphanie, but he finds himself obsessed with her in his dreamlife.

Gondry was the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also explored the oddities of subjective life in the context of love. That was from a Charlie Kaufman script—this movie is written by Gondry himself, and its ideas are more difficult. The camerawork and editing in The Science of Sleep is extremely intuitive, fast and fluid. The art direction and production design is absolutely amazing—very funny animation effects using paper, cellophane, and all kinds of unusual props. The sensibility is off-the-wall and often hilarious. Even so, whenever the story seems to be entering fairy tale wish-fulfillment territory, we are pulled up short by Gondry’s melancholy vision of the difficulties of romance and love. Stéphane is charming and cute, but he’s also immature, spiteful, self-centered, and incredibly insecure. Instead of just accepting Stéphanie, and her love for him, he resists and pushes and pulls, and his slipping in and out of dream states becomes a painful symbol of his desperate neediness and disconnection.

García Bernal has developed into a performer of admirable range, and he does a very good job here. This picture relies on his youthful charisma to draw the viewer in, so it might be a little disconcerting to those expecting a light comedy when his character’s shadow keeps sabotaging every possible happy ending. Gainsbourg is marvelous too. By no means does she play just a “love interest,” but a complex and rather prickly character in her own right.

I was touched by this film’s sensitive and many-sided viewpoint on dreams, fantasy, and love. There’s a special insight here about the drawbacks involved in being an artist—give Gondry credit for not taking the easy way, but showing us both the beauty and the limitations of imagination as the basis for a way of life. The Science of Sleep is a work of youthful energy that builds to a mature, ambivalent kind of wisdom.

In Old Joy, a new film by Kelly Reichardt, two friends go on a trip to search for a search for a hot springs in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. The picture, a critical fave since it opened at Sundance, is a deliberate exception to narrative rules: no arc, no resolution, no psychological insight—distancing is everything.

We first meet Mark, a soon-to-be father played by Daniel London, either meditating or spacing out in his backyard. After a phone call from his old pal Kurt, he maneuvers around his pregnant wife’s apparent disapproval in order to go on a weekend camping trip. After getting what he wants, he picks up Kurt (Will Oldham), a borderline eccentric and aging hippie, bald and bearded, who can’t seem to go more than an hour without smoking some weed. They take Mark’s car into the mountains and end up getting lost, pulling off the road and camping next to a trash dump. They talk by the campfire. Mark is reserved and somewhat distant, while Kurt rambles good-humoredly about transformative experiences at Big Sur and his opinions of quantum physics. There’s something of 1970s counterculture and lost idealism in Kurt, and he seems to want his friendship with Mark to be more like the old days.

Reichardt co-wrote the film with Jonathan Raymond, based on a story by Raymond, but the meaning of this journey is communicated more through subtle reaction shots and the mysterious beauty of the landscape than through dialogue. The gradual shift from city to country is perfectly evoked by the music composed for the film by the group Yo La Tengo. This is a movie of small details—blink and you might miss them.

Given the expensive nature of film production, and its status as a popular mass art form, most directors try to create the equivalent of a great novel, or in the case of a lot of Hollywood movies, a great comic book. Reichardt’s work here is more like that of a short story writer, with an understated and incidental quality that might take effect in your mind only after you start thinking about it later. The humor of the Kurt character—a self-conscious relic of another time lost in a haze of pot smoke—is very wry, and more than a little sad. Friendships can be more superficial than we think, and we can read our own relationship to the past in the Mark character’s amiable yet slightly puzzled responses to his friend’s attempts at intimacy. But this film is more like a meditation than a story. The scenery passing by outside the car window takes the place of the busy monologue or dramatic tension that we’ve come to expect from a movie, and it’s just this that accounts for the quiet feeling and beauty of Reichardt’s unusual point of view.

The title of the film comes from a dream that Kurt eventually tells his friend when they’re at the hot springs. And there’s something oddly dreamlike about the movie as well.