THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, A LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY IN MANILA BULLETIN, 18 JULY 2008)

I can’t get over it. It’s been over a month since my DVD weekend, the most memorable, dreamiest two hours of which unraveled like visions during R.E.M., as scene after scene I followed Versailles-born filmmaker Michel Gondry on his journey into the imaginative mind, The Science of Sleep (Warner Independent Pictures, 2006), originally entitled La Science des rêves, which literally means The Science of Dreams.

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First, we put in some random thoughts. And then we add a little bit of reminiscences of the day… mixed with some memories from the past. —Gael García Bernal as Stephane, The Science of Sleep

On the subject of dreams, I simply cannot resist musing about this dream of a movie again and again. But then, The Science of Sleep is one of the few movies you can watch over and over again.

Starring Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg and set as much in Paris as in the mind of its lead character, Stephane, Michel Gondry’s quirky, quixotic film is a love story as awkward as first love and almost as pathetic as obsession. To Bernal, who plays Stephane, a transplant from Mexico, a “white-collar drudge by day, genius by night,” who dreams in pictures as well as in English, French, and Spanish, it is a film about rejection. For Gainsbourg, who plays Stephane’s object of affection, Stephanie, “the characters are meant for each other and would find a way to be together,” but rather than a logical declaration, her statement, as she herself is quick to clarify, is in fact only a hopeful sentiment.

Indeed, even the lead actors can only guess. This clever film has none of the clichés, so that from start to finish, as the viewer confuses fact with fantasy, reality with reverie, he finds that a huge part of the film, particularly the ending, is subject to interpretation.

Like any work of art, The Science of Sleep is full of inspirations from its maker’s past. Gondry’s recurring childhood nightmare about giant hands has, for instance, woven itself into the fantastical visual of the film. So has what I assume to be his fond memory of S.E. Hinton’s iconic The Outsiders, if only because in his film, Golden the Pony Boy directly alludes to the lead character in the 1967 novel.

Indeed, even in Gondry’s references, real, unreal, and surreal intermingle. But really what separates fact from fiction? What separates imagination from actuality? Think about it: A sequence of delightful images makes up most of this 106-minute masterpiece by Michel Gondry, all unfolding in a city of dreams that is so much like Paris, albeit with paper boats afloat cellophane waves under cotton clouds and with skyscrapers and skyways crowded with cardboard cars and cardboard trains made entirely of toilet paper rolls. So why can’t an expanded sequence lasting anywhere between two and eight hours per night over the course of a lifetime, not counting the hours spent more consciously in daydreams, make up a life? After all, even the universe might have started merely as a figment of God’s imagination—or still is, unless God, too, is only the sum of all our dreams, the most depraved and the most divine, the lowliest and the loftiest, the best and the worst.

Or maybe I’m putting too much thought into what is designed ultimately as a dream, a chain of images, as defined in the Encarta World English Dictionary, “that appear involuntarily to the mind of a sleeping person, often a mixture of real and imaginary characters, places, and events.” What am I doing trying to unearth reality from this phantasmagoria? Like those images in the subconscious, The Science of Sleep is in parts cryptic at best, meaningless at worst. If there were any linear progression of events, it is only because, as Stephanie puts it in one of the scenes, “randomness is hard to achieve [and] organization merges back, if you don’t pay attention.”

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