November 02, 2006
science of sleep
This movie might be imagined as Marie Antoinette seen in a reflecting pool, with some of the appearances repeated, others inverted. If the former is an American film in Versailles, the current title is actual cinema Versaillaise (that is to say, the director was born there; finance capital comes from everywhere, an everywhere that itself emanates from the United States). But both are built on a young lovely tossed naked into the Gallic tilt-a-whirl and forced to make her and his way, respectively — and, of course, both are dreamlives. Moreover, they share the basic quality of incidentally pretending, through their Frenchness (whether it be political history or aesthetic provenance) to a kind of significance to which they are signally indifferent.
That is to say that, like Marie Antoinette, The Science of Sleep is a petulantly slight and directionless movie. Because it's Gondry rather than Coppola fille, the flimsiness is one of whimsy rather than missing affect. Gondry tropes buzz about, inevitably temporal (time travel, reality blurring, memory failure, artisanal model-making); happily, they're separated from the maleficent influence of Charlie Kaufman, the faux-indie film industry's official metanarrative boor, with whom Gondry worked on his previous feature fictions, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature. Whimsy in the service of nothing is still better than whimsy in the service of maturbatory fake-inventiveness. And so we get to wander through the whimsy, in search of contentless satisfactions: sexy Gael Garcia Bernal's facial expressions and tone of voice, the cardboard sets, Charlotte Gainsbourg's sexy-is-for-lesser-beings knit minidress, très années Pop. When she's not busy smoking, she makes felt boats and ponies.
Unlike Coppola, Gondry doesn't quite maintain the courage of his lack of convictions, and the film eventually gets a lil heavy, just as — uncoincidentallly — his visual verve wavers; we're still waiting for a film as euphorically formal as his video for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World." Instead, we're handed an ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending, or a final descent into delusion? Who cares. The real ambiguity is whether, lacking any idea how to get out of there, Gondry simply replicated wholesale an early Lyle Lovett song on purpose, or by magical accident, as Gael and Charlotte go out on the ocean, on their pony, which they ride on their boat.
Posted by jane at November 2, 2006 03:32 PM | TrackBack