I haven’t been to the Everyman for a very very long time – even longer than Donkey’s years.
It was very nice – a big auditorium filled with comfy looking armchairs and sofas instead of the usual cinema seats. There were only a couple of other people in there so it all looked set to be a great experience.
Trouble was the armchair style seat wasn’t as comfy as it looked – no lumbar support – even, if you can imagine such a thing, an anti-lumbar – it kind of caved in at the crucial point. And the screen is high up, whereas the chair focuses you straight, so you have to crick your neck up. And some people walked in halfway through and laughed in an annoying fashion.
Still I really liked the film. It hasn’t had the best reviews, but then the same was true of The Fountain which has really stayed with me (this I find to be the test of a good film).
The Science of Sleep is about Stéphane, a man who has difficulty distinguishing dreams and reality. At first he fancies Antoine De Caunes’s daughter, but then he sees the light and goes for Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter instead. Sorry that’s me not being able to distinguish the actresses' lineage from their characters. Very French.
One of the ignorant reviewers complained how dowdy Charlotte G is made to look, but one of Director Michel Gondry’s strokes of genius is to make her look both her mother’s daughter and her father’s daughter, often at the same time – and this fusion of dream shiksa and jewish princess I found to be strangely, almost irresistibly, sexy (readers interested in researching her genealogy further are invited to http://www.myspace.com/janebirkin050505.)
Anyway out of my reverie and back to the film. Like Stéphane, the viewer finds him or herself struggling to distinguish dream from reality and as a consequence the narrative becomes a little too fractured in parts, but its good sexy French fun, so you don’t really mind, although by the end I started to wonder if in fact Stéphane was certifiably meshugge, and I’m not sure whether any real woman (except maybe one who’s dad was Serge) would have put up with lines like “can I see your tits?” He didn’t even say “please”!
Like “Amélie”, the Paris of the Science of Sleep is one free from black faces, from violence, from poverty, from free running, from urban decay. Unlike Amélie, no one seems to have kicked up a fuss; further happy evidence I suspect of the decay of Parisian left wing intellectualism.
Stéphane is played by Gael García Bernal whom I understand to be popular with the ladies.
The film’s official website is rather good if a little fiddly – see http://wip.warnerbros.com/scienceofsleep/.
There’s a bit on there where they do dream analysis – below is a screen shot of mine, and you will see immediately how remarkably accurate it was!
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