Waking Up Is Hard to Do
Last weekend Nate & I saw The Science of Sleep in New York, down at one of the two independent movie theaters on Houston Street that I can never manage to distinguish. (The IFC or the Angelika? Or is there another one? Nate will recall this as the reason we walked two blocks in the wrong direction after coming out of the subway.) This is a movie worth watching.
Caveat: I'm not in a position to give this an authoritative review since I haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Michel Gondry, who wrote & directed Science, also directed Eternal Sunshine, and the two movies share a lot of subject matter. (I begin to think that perhaps I should really get around to seeing Eternal Sunshine.) Then again, I don't want to give an Authoritative Review so much as to say "I Liked It" and throw some adjectives at it, so, onwards.
Plot nutshell: youngish guy Stephane (Gael García Bernal, of Y tu mamá también fame) lives in Paris and moreover in a borderline dreamworld, unable to keep his conscious life from veering now and then into fantasy. He meets a gal, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whom he can seemingly share his individual little world with, but their growing relationship is frequently interrupted by Stephane's paranoia & general disconnectedness.
The most effective part of the plot is its resemblance to a typical movie template — Special Outsider Meets Love Interest, Is Made Less Lonely; She Transcends Her Everyday Life Through Him — that gradually breaks down. By the last half hour of the film, it's not at all clear whether Stephane's overwhelming imagination is going to turn out to be a gift or a prison. This all makes the ending (which I don't want to give away) a high-stakes affair thematically, even though the actual plot climax remains fairly low-key.
But the real reason to watch this movie is a series of dream sequences and scenes where Stephane is literally living inside his own head. A couple of the dreams in particular are uncanny recreations of what actual dreams feel like: airless rushes of halfway connected events, bizarre glosses on real people, disturbingly surreal backgrounds. (The backgrounds are really great: stop-animation cityscapes with cardboard buildings folding up & down like accordions.) In the mind-scenes, meanwhile, Stephane singlehandedly mans a TV studio-simulacrum crafted out of cardboard cameras and props; two large blinds to the outside world stand in for his eyes. He delivers a broadcast to his imagined audience, the movie's real audience.
I don't watch a whole lot of movies, all told, but I know it's rare to find one that can be both laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad, coming by both honestly. Such a miraculously imaginative and painfully fragile sense of whimsy is even more rare. You'll want to see this.
Short version: "I Liked It! . . . Miraculously imaginative. . . . You'll want to see this!"
Caveat: I'm not in a position to give this an authoritative review since I haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Michel Gondry, who wrote & directed Science, also directed Eternal Sunshine, and the two movies share a lot of subject matter. (I begin to think that perhaps I should really get around to seeing Eternal Sunshine.) Then again, I don't want to give an Authoritative Review so much as to say "I Liked It" and throw some adjectives at it, so, onwards.
Plot nutshell: youngish guy Stephane (Gael García Bernal, of Y tu mamá también fame) lives in Paris and moreover in a borderline dreamworld, unable to keep his conscious life from veering now and then into fantasy. He meets a gal, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whom he can seemingly share his individual little world with, but their growing relationship is frequently interrupted by Stephane's paranoia & general disconnectedness.
The most effective part of the plot is its resemblance to a typical movie template — Special Outsider Meets Love Interest, Is Made Less Lonely; She Transcends Her Everyday Life Through Him — that gradually breaks down. By the last half hour of the film, it's not at all clear whether Stephane's overwhelming imagination is going to turn out to be a gift or a prison. This all makes the ending (which I don't want to give away) a high-stakes affair thematically, even though the actual plot climax remains fairly low-key.
But the real reason to watch this movie is a series of dream sequences and scenes where Stephane is literally living inside his own head. A couple of the dreams in particular are uncanny recreations of what actual dreams feel like: airless rushes of halfway connected events, bizarre glosses on real people, disturbingly surreal backgrounds. (The backgrounds are really great: stop-animation cityscapes with cardboard buildings folding up & down like accordions.) In the mind-scenes, meanwhile, Stephane singlehandedly mans a TV studio-simulacrum crafted out of cardboard cameras and props; two large blinds to the outside world stand in for his eyes. He delivers a broadcast to his imagined audience, the movie's real audience.
I don't watch a whole lot of movies, all told, but I know it's rare to find one that can be both laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad, coming by both honestly. Such a miraculously imaginative and painfully fragile sense of whimsy is even more rare. You'll want to see this.
Short version: "I Liked It! . . . Miraculously imaginative. . . . You'll want to see this!"
3 Comments:
Gondry didn't write the screenplay for Spotless Mind.
Okey-dokey, I'll change that bit. IMDB does have him with a co-credit for the story.
I'm glad to hear that you both liked the movie - I was skeptical about it - was afraid that the animations would be too self-indulgent or something ('cause, frankly, Spotless Mind was self-indulgent enough for me (is it okay to not like Charlie Kaufmann's movies?)).
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