Shots in the dark: diving into the fantastical world of Michel Gondry

Interview, Oct, 2006 by Graham Fuller

Since screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze are purportedly making another film together, the so-called metamovie may not have played itself out, though it has possibly swallowed its own tail. Michel Gondry, who made the uneven Human Nature (2001) and the sublime Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), both from Kaufman scripts, has sadly run aground with The Science of Sleep, which he both wrote and directed. Not without its pleasures, the autobiographical romantic comedy is as overdetermined in its childlike illogic and M.C. Escher-like jigsaw puzzles as the hectic dream life of its protagonist. At 104 minutes, it feels like one of Gondry's surreal music videos stretched to the breaking point.

Films in which one or more characters become aware that they have entered, left, or still exist in an imaginary or otherwise fictional space that morphs seamlessly with their present reality are nothing new: Bugs Bunny cartoons and Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) are superb examples. But the democratizing of image-making via the Internet--with its webcams, MySpaces, YouTubes, and frenetic exhibitionism--could partly explain why some of today's best filmmakers have become fascinated with self-consciousness. Now that anyone can be a director, actor, or character (or, for that matter, a film critic) and get their stuff out there for everyone to see, it's no wonder that stars especially are accepting invitations to contemplate their onscreen personas onscreen. Professional narcissists thrive in halls of mirrors.

Solipsistic and ironic, Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996), Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich (1999), and Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story have Maggie Cheung, John Malkovich, and Steve Coogan respectively turning their images outside-in. Dreaming her last dream, the suicidal actress (Naomi Watts) of David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001) relives her degradation in Hollywood as an emotional and professional success until she stumbles upon the decomposing corpse she has become by the film's end. What these films did for actors, David Cronenberg's Existenz (1999) did for video gamers, Jonze and Kaufman's masterpiece Adaptation (2002) did for writers, and Eternal Sunshine did for brokenhearted lovers. Cronenberg's A History of Violence invited audiences to watch a violent movie that comments on the experience of watching a violent movie.

Jean-Luc Godard reinvented (and politicized) art-house metacinema by making movies about moviemaking, and his French New Wave colleague Jacques Rivette used it to explore life as an infinite sojourn in the imaginary. The Science of Sleep attempts to do the same by merging the reality and dreams of an illustrator, Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal), whose psychological development (like that of Jim Carrey's Joel in Eternal Sunshine) has been blocked by his Oedipal fixation on his mother (Miou-Miou). He is so regressive that his resulting emotional misfiring should have earned the movie the title Maladaptation.

Following the death of his father, Stephane has returned to Paris and taken a job designing calendars, only to find that he's been hired as a pasteup artist. Not realizing he and his sweet new neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), have fallen in love, he pesters her to give him her sexy girlfriend's phone number. His mentoring by an older vulgarian colleague and his bizarre acting-out eventually alienate Stephanie, so he may have to settle for having her in his dreams; Gainsbourg's force field is so magnetic, incidentally, that she feels more immediate to us than to her would-be boyfriend.

In keeping with Gondry's shabby low-tech aesthetic, Stephane dreams up and sometimes flies through a cardboard-cutout world that's reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's linking cartoons in Monty Python's Flying Circus. The anarchic Pythons made their medium--television--their message by ruthlessly satirizing TV genres and formats. Similarly, Stephane has his own TV show, which "airs" during his dreams. Styled like Blue's Clues, say, it provides him a platform to show how dreams are "prepared"--for cooking, literally, in a pot--and a ready-made audience, himself. Rut the window it offers him (through the TV on his studio set) offers the same childish perspective that's stopping him from growing up. Unlike Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine, The Science of Sleep never transcends its infantilism to get at deeper meanings because the stream of consciousness and unconsciousness on which Stephane is drifting never divides.

Graham Fuller is Interview's film writer at large.