Do You Shave with Toast?

Michel Gondry’s mind is a wonderfully weird place to inhabit.

The Science of Sleep, written and directed by Michel Gondry, is a refreshing and enlightening cinematic masterpiece. For the real cinema buffs, it has a hint of cinéma vérité, heavily coated with sporadic elements of absurd surrealism, and peppered with a dash of French New Wave. Look in the crock-pot, and you have one charming and clever concoction of cinema.

The Science of Sleep would even make the legendary surrealists, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, revel in their graves, as it seems to allude to their 1929 masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou, a film born of the two filmmakers’ dreams.

Like Buñuel and Dali, the mind of Michel Gondry is a wonderfully weird place to inhabit for a couple of hours. His story centers on Stéphane, a young introvert and optimistic dreamer with a wildly vivid imagination, played by the effervescent and beguiling Gael Garcia Bernal. After his father’s death, Stéphane moves back to Paris to take on a calendar-making job, assuming he’ll thrive by expressing himself and utilizing his creativity. Along the way, he meets his neighbor, Stephanie, played by the lovely Charlotte Gainsbourg, who he instantly falls head-over-heels over with a child-like exuberance, innocence, and purity.

The plot is simple: boy meets girl, girl rejects boy, boy longs for girl — a simple formula that lovingly distracts with delightful and quirky images. The Science of Sleep is an interactive experience as you are invited to interpret every frame and are encouraged to mistake the boundaries of real vs. fantasy.

Where else can you see a spider typewriter, a monstrous electric shaver, a city of cardboard, and a cloth horse riding on a ship that floats over a sea of cellophane? Everything in The Science of Sleep is touching and heartfelt, especially the actors’ nuanced performances. There is never a dull moment. Even the dialogue, with all its truthful humor, will keep you on your toes. In what other films will you ever hear the question, “Do you shave with toast?” posed with such goofy seriousness?

The Science of Sleep captures the feeling of youth, idealism, and the bittersweet longing for love. In the hands of Michel Gondry, he proves that love and romance can be the most creative process in our lives, and that truth resides in our deepest dreams.

A word to the wise: Don’t try and make sense out of what is real and what is a dream in the protagonist’s mind. Enjoy the ride, go with the flow, and inundate your soul with love’s boundless magic. Even the film’s tagline advises you to “Close your eyes, open your heart.” If you take a chance, it might just change your life.

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