DREAM ON-“The Science of Sleep” and “Renaissance.”

by ANTHONY LANE for NEW YORKER Issue of 2006-09-25 Of the many things not to expect from Michel Gondry—the man behind “Human Nature” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”—the most obvious is a clear linear narrative. Given that he is unable, or at any rate fiercely unwilling, to tell a story straight, one wonders how the director copes with the rest of life. How on earth does he make a cup of coffee? Does he grind the water, boil the beans, and gently spew the whole thing back into the pot? The excitable fragmentation that has built up throughout his work now explodes in “The Science of Sleep,” a multilingual burst of English, Spanish, and French. It stars Gael García Bernal as Stéphane, a young Mexican who, following the death of his father, has been called to Paris by his French mother (Miou-Miou). In an effort to impose regularity on his existence, she gets him a job designing promotional calendars. “I glue paper in a basement all day,” he complains, and signals his scorn by drawing his kind of calendar—exploding airplane for June, earthquake for August, and so forth, each month marked by a fresh catastrophe. This got a laugh when I saw the movie, and you buy the gag because of the absurd, irreproachable innocence of the character, yet it gestures toward a more worrying innocence in Gondry himself: how ruinous would an event—or an emotion—have to be before he considered it as anything other than an opportunity for play? What Stéphane really wants to do is invent, and to this end he constructs a number of brightly colored, wire-sprouting gizmos, which—to the surprise of everyone but himself—actually work. I was particularly taken by the time-stopper, which emits a little flash and drags the user back a couple of seconds, so that his or her immediate experience is repeated. (It could be a director’s second take, or a projection glitch; “The Science of Sleep” is partly a movie about the deep desire to have life behave more like a movie.) The device is obviously related to the memory-wiper in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the difference being that, whereas that one was used to peel two lovers apart, this one helps to paste two friends together. Stéphane has a new neighbor, the tellingly named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whom he first encounters when he helps to haul her piano upstairs. Needless to say, it tumbles back down—a cacophonous echo of Laurel and Hardy in “The Music Box,” another tribute to fond exasperation. Stéphanie is our hero’s dream girl, meaning that she capers through his dreams. At the start of the film, he demonstrates how to make dreams, literally mixing the ingredients—yearnings, daily occurrences, a heaped spoonful of memory, and so on—into a steaming pot. He stirs and gibbers like a TV chef, performing in a cardboard studio of his own imagining; his recipe for dreaming, in other words, is all part of a dream from which he will have to wake up. From here on, ordinary conversations keep slipping a gear into reverie, as Stéphane suddenly finds himself gliding through back-projected skies or bathing in water made from cellophane. These shifts are skillfully done, and Gondry’s animations are endearingly cheapjack, but there is something willed and chronic in his need to flee, at every turn, into the wondrous. Filmmakers with more patience discovered long ago that to sit in the dark and watch a movie is itself a species of dreaming, and that a tentative love story, say, can seem quite unreal enough—“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again”—without having extra fantasies forced upon it. Gondry, who sharpened his talents on music videos, has no time for such meditative airs, and he makes Stéphane’s dreaming as silly and scattershot as possible, so as to rebuke the stolidity of the mature world. The sheer size too, the excessive abundance, scale, and exaggeration of dreams could be an infantile characteristic. The most ardent wish of children is to grow up and get as big a share of everything as the grown-ups; they are hard to satisfy; do not know the meaning of “enough.” That is Freud, in “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). It is a book that stood on the threshold of the movies, and the gravity of its claims (“There are no trivial initiators of dreams, and thus no innocuous dreams,” Freud says) has not just provoked filmmakers but, as it were, sorted out the adults from the kids. Some of the adults, like Buster Keaton, did their most graceful work in the least solemn of genres (no one has improved on the dreamscape of his “Sherlock, Jr.”), whereas the kids, as if playing at being grownups, have always tried to flavor their immaturity with something perverse—George Lucas with his grandiosity, Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton with their thirst for the grotesque, and now Michel Gondry with his sweet naïveté. In this case, he is abetted by Gael García Bernal, a good sport who couldn’t be unappealing if he tried. To watch him sprout a pair of giant foam-rubber hands may well be the last word in postmodernism, but from where I was sitting it looked more like an outtake from an old Monkees show. “The Science of Sleep” is a frantic and funny diversion, but it pales and tires before its time is up. It doesn’t know the meaning of enough. Thanks to the riches with which new technology continues to embarrass the movie industry, a growing number of films announce themselves as neither live-action nor animation but as something wrought and trip-like in between. Anyone who has staggered out of “Sin City,” or requested a set of fresh eyeballs after watching Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly,” will realize that this no man’s land is turning out to be dangerously fertile. Take Motion Capture, whereby an actor, draped with a network of responsive markers along the body, performs a series of choreographed movements, which are plotted on a computer and then laminated with layers of additional detail. The master of this strategy is Peter Jackson, who created Gollum and King Kong, the latter verging so closely on hyperrealism (the hair, the creased skin, the grumpy snort of the nostrils) that it wound up shedding the magic of the original beast. But what happens if you head in the other direction—if you treat the skeletal coördinates of Motion Capture as a starting point for the stylized? The result, it would seem, is “Renaissance.” The place is Paris and the year is 2054, by which time even Jacques Chirac has left office. Power resides in the hands of a company named Avalon, whose billboards, advertising a mixture of comfort and threat (“We’re on your side, for life”), loom over the frightened city. It is plainly Paris, but the quays rise as if on stilts above the Seine, suggesting that half the river has drained or boiled away, while the feet of the Eiffel Tower are planted on a glass piazza, so that pedestrians below can glance upward and, to all appearances, watch their fellow-citizens walk on air. It is a treacherous landscape in which to follow a lead, but such is the task facing Karas, a tight-voiced policeman. He must find a young woman named Ilona, an Avalon employee who has been kidnapped under cover of night, and his only weapons are a gun, a hunch, and a beautiful sister: the essential armory of the B-movie cop. Anyone weaned on the shadowy conspiracies of film noir will shrug at the plot of “Renaissance,” but the lack of novelty is deliberate; it is the shadows themselves that have changed. As far as I can gather, the main concern of the director, Christian Volckman, is to forge a true black-and-white movie: black, white, and nothing else—no surreptitious grays, no fogs of indecision. The characters, too, are carved out with alarming physical clarity, as though Volckman had thrown aside his pioneering software and picked up a printer’s woodblock. If there is a sense of mismatch here, it rises from the coupling of body and head; because of Motion Capture, Karas and the women stalk through the film with feline ease, but their features are so whittled as to be inexpressive—sometimes no more than a few slashed lines for cheekbones, collarbones, nose, and mouth. The hands tell us more than the faces, which is good news for anyone writing a paper on the influence of Rodin in world cinema, but which also suggests a cumbersome journey ahead for Volckman and his ilk: how far can any strain of film progress when it struggles to chart the flow of feeling on an individual face? Despite those worries, “Renaissance” is certainly one of the year’s more luscious releases, offering not just the sleekest car chase but the most romantic of rainstorms. The characters’ voices are provided by Daniel Craig, Catherine McCormack, Jonathan Pryce, and others: fine speakers all, although they tend to be smothered by the sort of higher cheesiness which sounds so much better in French. We are told, for instance, that when Ilona disappeared she was working on “the protocol for immortality.” To us, that sounds both ponderous and daft, whereas for any self-respecting Parisienne it clearly refers to a new and madly desirable brand of face cream. Of course! Now I get it. Ilona is the Avalon Lady, and Karas (whose own name sounds like a male fragrance) must find her in time for the launch of a new line. Case closed.