PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 9/08/06)

While many narrative artists swing out at the autobiographical bildungsroman as soon as they step into the batter's box, French writer-director-animator Michel Gondry waited until his fourth feature (his priors being Human Nature, the instant classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Dave Chappelle's Block Party, the DVD of which is reviewed in the July/August issue's Home Guide) to make a picture about a very clever, somewhat socially inept, dream-and-disaster-obsessed young artist and his travails with love, work, and the outside world. And as much as I enjoyed many great big enormously imaginative chunks of The Science of Sleep, I must also admit there were moments during the film when I thought it was sort of a pity that Gondry hadn't allowed his musings on the condition of being young and brilliant and misunderstood to just pass quietly from his system.

Gael García Bernal is an engaging actor, and the multiform products of his character's creative imagination — manifesting themselves in animations that recall the work of Svankmajer, Alexeieff, and many other greats while being refreshingly whimsical in their very own, shall we say, French way — are truly fantastic. But his character, Stephane, who's stuck in a hilariously dismal job at a calendar-making outfit and kind of in love with a next-door neighbor whose physical proximity to his living space he wants to keep secret, is quite a bit of a jerk. Which isn't a problem in and of itself — just that Gondry seems to think that Stephane's being quite a bit of a jerk is sort of cute, which is really what tips you off that this is, in fact, a work in the autobiographical bildungsroman mode. Sure, the characters in Eternal Sunshine were hardly models of deportment, but Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman portrayed them with detachment; you recognized the characters' flaws and maybe empathized with them, or maybe you didn't but got what they were about anyway.

Eternal Sunshine was about memory, love, loss, and so on; Science tinkers with being about at least love and loss, but mainly ends up being about the contents of Michel Gondry's head, which does concern itself with some of the above-mentioned themes but is finally more notable for containing a lot of really amazing-looking stuff. I'm not saying Gondry needs Charlie Kaufman. Just that as a writer, Gondry hasn't created something as resonant as a Kaufman script. And by the same token, it's not likely you'll see a film more visually exhilarating until, well, Gondry's next — whoever writes it.

—Glenn Kenny