Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep

You have the most fascinating dreams. Unique, vibrant and random, they clearly reveal your artfulness and intelligence—that is, until you try to tell someone about them. Somehow when you get to that part about the bear and your 6th-grade math teacher on the roller coaster, your listener doesn’t find it half as profound as you’re sure it must be.

“To translate a dream in a really striking way, you don’t give a strict interpretation,” explains Michel Gondry, the director known best for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, his Oscar-winning collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. “You want to keep some of that abstraction and you want to convey the emotional effect. If you just recount all the details, it’s boring and it just interests you.”

But if there’s anyone whose dreams would be endlessly fascinating in the retelling it would probably be Gondry, who not only visually conjured Kaufman’s heady, sumptuous exploration of love, loss and memory in Eternal Sunshine, but created groundbreaking music videos like Björk’s “Human Behaviour,” the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” and The White Stripes as LEGOs in “Fell in Love With a Girl.” He’s also the first director to use “morphing” in a music video, and he’s the technical innovator behind filmmaking landmarks like the method of shooting several still cameras in an array to create the illusion of someone hanging frozen in air, as seen in Björk’s “Army of Me” video. (Later this technique was used to stunning effect in The Matrix.)

In The Science of Sleep, the first feature he both wrote and directed, Gondry applies this visionary invention to his longtime fascination with dreams, using plenty of his own subconscious adventures in the process. The story follows the days and (more often) nights of Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal), a twentysomething artist who moves to his mother’s native France after his father’s death in Mexico. When he starts work at a dreary job and meets an intriguing neighbor coincidentally named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his dreams begin wreaking havoc on his waking life, and the line between what’s real and what’s a blip in his nocturnal synapses starts to blur just as much for the audience as it does for Stéphane.

To say the dreamscapes here are fantastical is an understatement; Stéphane’s sleeping world involves, for starters: a talk-show set (for “Stéphane TV”) made of cardboard and egg cartons, machines that take insect form, cities paved with LPs, and a rock band consisting of his coworkers dressed in cat costumes. It’s up to us to guess which of these Gondry dreamed up while sleeping, and which he invented on the page.

“I’ve always been interested in the dream process,” he says, explaining that, even as a child, he tried to make real-world connections with people while in a lucid-dream state—for example, saying something to a family member in a dream and hoping they’d repeat it to him when they were both fully awake. “That was the starting point for the story, connecting [with people] in dreams, but not being able to connect in real life.”