Life as "Science."

Fall is always exciting because it means that the craptastic movies of the summer are over! Finally previews that you have been seeing all summer are beginning to materialize and expectations are either met or crushed. One movie that I have been waiting for for quite some time is “The Science of Sleep,” which I saw today. My expectations were neither met nor crushed but instead I left feeling a little indifferent towards it.

Written and directed by Michel Gondry (of “Eternal Sunshine” fame) the movie is a trippy look into how different people perceive and distort reality. The main character waltzes in and out of his dreams and real life until he can’t quite seem to keep them straight. It’s a visually pleasing film and I love the kind of “imperfect” camera work that Gondry brings to his movies. Unfortunately, that imperfection translates to the entire movie this time and at moments it seems like a confusing mess. Even in that confusion though, the performances of Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg are charming enough to keep you interested.

It ends up being an interesting look at how our mind can play tricks on us and the comfort that living in a dreamland can bring you. Free of inhibitions in dreams, people are able to enact their wildest fantasies, confront their fears, and lose themselves. Those wild fantasies are often handled in a fun animated fashion throughout the movie, which adds to both the excitement and the confusion. Like “Eternal Sunshine” the ideas of being able to alter things comes up a lot and what the affect on our lives would be were we able to.

It’s always refreshing to see a movie where the love stories aren’t handled in a cookie-cutter manner. It never hurts to reiterate the fact that life is NOT a movie but this movie comes close to realistically portraying what real life friendships/love interests are like. Embracing the imperfections of life can be difficult but when forced to wake up and face them it allows a sense of freedom.

To me this is more of an interesting “art-project” than a brilliant film but it is sure to spark conversation with whomever you go with. After a summer full of “Superman,” and “Mission Impossible,” conversation after a movie might feel foreign but that’s not always a bad thing.
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