film | Snooze alarmed

Let it be known: I heart Michel Gondry. I heart his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I heart the DVD collection of his commercials and short films, and I especially heart his music videos for the Chemical Brothers, Kylie Minogue and Cibo Matto. I do not, however, heart THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, Gondry's quirky, fluttering juxtaposition of slumberland fantasia and covers-yanked-off reality — actually, his vision of covers-yanked-off reality is pretty fantasied, too — that cracks under the weight of its own incessant whimsy. What happened? My guess is that Gondry, for the first time, is working from his own screenplay, not a script from the brilliant imagination of Charlie Kaufman (who authored Gondry's Eternal Sunshine and Human Nature), and not a catchy dance-pop song that compliments Gondry's dependably trippy visual aesthetic terrifically. Yeah, Gondry's an insanely inventive director. As a writer, well ... he's an insanely inventive director.

The über-charming Gael García Bernal (Y Tu Mamá También) plays Sleep's drowsy hero, but the movie stretches his innate likeability so far that it snaps. As Stepháne, an aspiring inventor who awkwardly flits between the brash spunk of his dream self and the social insecurities of his waking life, Bernal is such an irritatingly infantilized man-child that he makes the pop persona of, say, Adam Sandler seem posh enough to join Dame Judi Dench for afternoon tea. Stepháne wobbles into a crush on his new apartment neighbor (Charlotte Gainsbourg) — her name: why, Stephánie, of course — but since their kooky pseudo-courtship develops both in actuality and in his unconscious mind, and because Gondry insists on blurring the lines between the two, you're never quite sure how to interpret the logic of the characters' actions: Somnambulating, Stepháne slides nonsensical letters under Stephánie's door, and he breaks into her place in order to kidnap a beloved stuffed horse to rig to it a mechanism that enables it to gallop on its own; she responds with anger (understandable) at his invasion of her privacy, then expresses adoration for the gift; he's momentarily humble and penitent before bouncing back to his bratty collegiate-kindergarten jocularity ("I like your boobs. They're very friendly and unpretentious"). At best, he's merely insane; at worst, he's an off-puttingly petulant baby who reins in his obvious desire for Stephánie by treating her pretty much like crap. Either way, The Science of Sleep's coddling, twee portrayal of him as an endearingly introspective stargazer is a bit of a stretch.

Gondry's flights of fancy and reliance on unusually dazzling (but low-tech) effects — a television studio made from egg cartons, a faucet that runs a stream of crinkled blue cellophane — struggle to liberate the film from its obnoxious personality and inane cutesy-poo dialogue (Stepháne: "Each structure has its own resonant frequency!"; Stephánie: "Destruction is an obstruction for the construction!"), but it's in vain. As a pure example of Gondry's mind-bending sensory ingenuity, The Science of Sleep is nothing less than a doozy. As a winking portrait of the creative mind gone astray, however, it is what it eats. C-