"The Science of Sleep:"

One of the best movies of the year opens Friday in limited release. From my review in the 9/25 issue of The American Conserivative:

"The Science of Sleep," a surrealist romantic comedy by famed music video director Michel Gondry, is a manic but sweet-tempered reverie about why no woman in her right mind should fall in love with a truly imaginative artist, such as, say, Michel Gondry.

The young Mexican leading man, Gael García Bernal, freed from the portentousness of playing Che Guevara in "The Motorcycle Diaries," is sublimely charming as Gondry's alter ego, shy and self-absorbed Stephane, a childlike graphic designer whose inability to tell his waking life from his outlandish, ever-mutating dreams beguiles and exasperates the girl next door, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg).

The boyish Gondry, whose video biography is aptly entitled "I've Been Twelve Forever," may strike some viewers as terminally twee, but many will find his "Science of Sleep" a funny, sad, and dazzling slice of the Ambien Age. (It opens Sept. 22.)

The profundity of dreams has been overrated from the Old Testament through Freud (whose now-fading renown was launched by The Interpretation of Dreams). Gondry sides instead with Vladimir Nabokov, who complained of dreams' "mental mediocrity."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer