The Science of Sleep is Michael Gondry's third feature film, but the first picture which he has written. His other two pictures were written by Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and varied wildly in quality. Human Nature was an uneven mess of a film, but not without its own unique sense of intelligence and charm. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was unique and intelligent as well, but Gondry managed to infuse it with a consistent sense of style and tone that suited it perfectly. It was an improvement of leaps and bounds over his first effort. And now, with The Science of Sleep Gondry seems to have reverted back to the unevenness of Human Nature, albeit to much better results.

To say that this movie will not be for everyone is a vast understatement. Even a stop-motion and self indulgence enthusiast such as myself had trouble at times muscling my way through it. But I did manage to, and now several days later, I look back on it with fondness rather than indifference (or hatred for that matter). For all of its bumps and frantic (at times off-putting) tone, it will manage to endear itself to the audience that allows it to do so.

I can not accurately convey the tone of The Science of Sleep, but I'm going to attempt anyway. The movie is shown through the eyes of its protagonist Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is by nature, kind of insane. He “invents” things that can't exist, but are fun to dream about, and at times he gets lost in his subconscious which is filled with stop-motion characters and landscapes, and have physics all to themselves. I found it impossible to relate to what was happening on screen, if for no other reason than I was meant to. Stephane's schizophrenic mind is so steep that for much of the time he himself has trouble distinguishing his imagination from reality. Since we see the film through his eyes, we too are disoriented. At times I think I wanted this sporadic imaginative narrative to calm down a bit to let the characters talk to one another uninterrupted, but I realized after the film had finished that this would probably have dulled the impact.

There is a scene near the end of the picture where Stephanie (Stephane's love interest; played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) is openly flirting with another man at a party. It is at this point that I realized that Gondry's narrative did not in fact hinder the emotional impact of its characters because I, like Stephane, felt a pang of jealousy. For a film of such wild ambition to be able to manufacture genuine emotion is a rarity. Even if it had not managed this feat, I probably would have still recommended it. The fact that it did achieve something real is the reason I recommend it highly.