What Dreams May Come: Michel Gondry and The Science of Sleep

Words: Holly Willis

Photo: Autumn de Wilde

If you've seen the delightful 1934 film L'Atalante, it should come as no surprise that it's a favorite of filmmaker Michel Gondry, who reveres its visionary director, Jean Vigo. L'Atalante is one of the greatest films ever because it is a simple story, and Vigo could put all of his genius into it, Gondry claims. ''You have one layer that is very straightforward and one layer that is genius, and the two together? Amazing.''

The same might be said of Gondry's own work in general, and of his new feature film, The Science of Sleep, in particular. On the one hand, it's a simple, if fraught, love story in which Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) falls for Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), but continually messes things up, in part because he can't clearly separate his dream life from his waking life. But that straightforward story is topped by the Gondry genius, which appears in the filmmaker's comical dreamworlds and in the ideas and inventions of Stéphane, who is clearly Gondry's stand-in. Moving fluidly between dreams and the real world, live action and stop-motion animation, fact and fiction, Gondry's third narrative feature is as charming and personal as anything he's made to date.

I arrived on the 25th floor of an office building in Los Angeles' mid-Wilshire district to interview Gondry about The Science of Sleep last March. I'd interviewed him several times on the phone, but we'd never met in person (although I once boldly introduced myself at a screening, only to find out I was speaking to his brother, Twist). I'd also had the strange pleasure of listening in while Gondry interviewed Twist for RES two years ago. I'd tried to hang up, but Michel insisted I stay on the line, so there I was, a guilty witness to the often charged interaction between two brothers, at once certain it was all an act and pained by some of their revelations of love gone awry. Waiting for Gondry to arrive, I considered his career while staring down at the tiny toylike cars and the orderly streets, the dogs barking in backyards and the airplanes landing and taking off in the distance. It was surreal, and could have been - should have been - animated.

Already an established music video director, Gondry broke into feature filmmaking in 2001 with the flawed Human Nature, an allegory about the fuzzy line between nature and culture written by Charlie Kaufman. He followed it with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004, again working with Kaufman, as well as artist and longtime friend Pierre Bismuth (the trio won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay). This time, Gondry crafted an enormously pleasurable visualization of memory in which his characters traverse memory landscapes in snippets of time and fragments of space.

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To read this article in its entirety, pick up the July/August issue of RES, on newsstands now.