Dropping science like Galileo dropped an orange

David Lynch is the only contemporary director who's approximated the danger of Luis Bunuel's Mexican-era dream sequences; Michel Gondry is the only contemporary director who's approximated the playfulness of Bunuel's French-era dream sequences. Fey and detached, The Science of Sleep relies entirely on the charm of its actors, not the least of which is Gael Garcial Bernal, whose intensely erotic mouth must intone dialogue in French, Spanish, and English; his skewed line readings give exchanges like "I like your boobs: they are simple and unpretentious" a sophomoric awe that mitigates the smut. A compelling camera subject, Bernal projects enough sexual magnetism to kick against the froth. Charlotte Gainsborough makes a worthy foil, for a while; we can understand why he's fascinated by this woman, who looks him straight in the eye when calling his bullshit and is intoxicated by him anyway. Beyond that, though, she's a vaporous heroine, called into existence by Bernal's poseur-scientist. Their relationship lacks the erotic tension of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet's in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; not the least of the earlier film's insights into romance is the realization that turmoiled recollection aggrandizes the banal mechanics of a failed relationship.

Like Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty, the jokes in The Science of Sleep exist for their own sake. The Shakesperean fools in Eternal Sunshine (a game Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, and Tom Wilkinson)... represented genuine relief from Carrey and Winslet's angst; in The Science of Sleep it's as if Twelth Night's Feste took over Othello (here Feste is incarnated by Alain Chabat's droll, vulgar Guy). I'm loath to give Charlie Kaufman credit for ESOSM's achievements since nothing in his previous work suggested he cared enough about human relationships, but I can't shake the suspicion that Gondry can create these formalist exercises in predictable surreal frivolity for the next 20 years.