And Gondry, who sharpened his eye making commercials and music videos, is a kindred spirit. He forgoes computerized special effects in favor of stop-motion animation and papier-mache, finding magical possibilities in homely materials and ordinary situations. Stephane's job, for instance, is a familiar nightmare of daily drudgery with annoying colleagues (including the spectacularly obnoxious Guy, played by Alain Chabat), but also a source of perpetual surprise and, for the audience, comic enchantment.
Gondry's debt to Surrealism lies in his embrace of the notion that the unconscious is a kingdom governed by its own perverse logic, beyond the control of reason. His vision of the unconscious, however, is remarkably benign. The dream world of The Science of Sleep is not haunted by primal sexual terror or constructed for purposes of social criticism, the way Bunuel's landscapes were. It has, instead, a wide-eyed, picture-book quality, an air of almost aggressive innocence.
After a while, the spell wears off. Not because the film's inventiveness wanes, but because its mood changes, slowly but noticeably, from eager enthrallment to desperation. The gray of daylight seeps in around the edges, and Stephane's dreams become less an escape from the frustrations of ordinary life than another potential source of disappointment. His childlike behavior, especially around Stephanie, begins to seem intemperate and regressive, a petulant refusal to wake up into the rational, adult world.
And so you leave this buoyant, impish movie feeling a little blue: sorry that it had to end and also wishing, perhaps, that it amounted to more. But its fugitive, ephemeral quality is part of its point: dreams, after all, are hard to remember, and perhaps don't hold the meanings they seem to. Without them, though, our minds would be emptier and our lives much smaller. So while The Science of Sleep may not, in the end, be terribly deep, it is undoubtedly — and deeply — refreshing.
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