The Science of Sleep is a fascinating movie diverging into alternate reality in a psychedlic world. I didn't know what to make of this movie, my initial impressions at first from the title and hearing that the director Michel Gondry did music videos for the Foo fighters, I was expecting a science fiction drama.
What I certainly did not expect was this kind of a movie, I don't know where to begin, it is a psychodelic enchanting and mesmerising vision through the main lead, played by Gael Garcia Bernal (unrecognisable from the angry mexican in Babel).
He plays Stephane, from a spanish father and a french mother, coming to France for one of the few times and staying in his mother's apartment (she is the local landlady) as he starts a new job, Stephane sees and interpretes the world around him through his vivid dreams, and this is the magic of the movie, it involves animation, special effects and psychodelic images to bring those dreams vividly to life and has the director's trademark impossibly large hands that have become an iconic symol in the Foo Fighters music videos , not to mention it is also a love story with Stephane having a crush on his neighbor (Stephanie), played enchantedly by Charlotte Gainsbourg (she is the daughter of English film star Jane Birkin and French composer Serge Gainsbourg best known for the hanuting classic romantic song "Je t'aime", on a side not I was quite surprised to find out Charlotte Gainsbourg is very shy about speaking english she apparently learnt it via elocution, for someone who is shy she speaks it fluently without any trace of an accent, I might add she sounds just like her mother when she speaks it), who Stephane realises is the only one who truly understands him and his dreamy take on life. The Science of Sleep is unlike any movie in it's genre, and you may either love it or loathe it, but what is clear is it captures vividly the dreamy world we have been to and will instantly recognise.
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