This Should Work

Have you ever tried to explain your dreams to someone? If so it may go something like this:

I had this weird dream last night where (CHOOSE THE NAME OF SOMEONE IN YOUR LIFE) was at my house, but it wasn’t really my house. We were talking about (CHOOSE A RANDOM SUBJECT) when they got up and walked into what should have been the kitchen, but it turned into (CHOOSE THE NAME OF SIGNIFICANT PLACE YOU KNOW). And there were some other things, but I can’t remember the whole thing, I just remember feeling (PICK AN EMOTION).

That’s kinda how I would describe Michel Gondry’s new movie The Science of Sleep: I had trouble following the narrative, but the emotional feelings stayed with me. The story is relatively simple: A man, Stephane played by Gael Garica Bernal, tries to court a woman, Stephanie played by Charlotte Gainsburg. But Stephane -as his mother puts it- confuses his dreams with reality which lead to some mis-steps in his courtship of Stephanie.

This blurring of real and dream life is what make it hard to follow the narrative thread of the film. Characters quickly switch between speaking English, Spanish, and French-sometimes in mid-sentence. Sometimes Stephane will walk through a door and go from the real-world into the dream-world.

Early in the film Stephane says “in dreams, emotions are overwhelming” and it’s the emotions in that fill every frame in this film. It seems that Gondry and company are less worried about the audience following the narrative thread and more concerned with us following the emotional thread of the characters. In fact the emotions that this film stirs up were so overwhelming for me that I would have cried on my way out of the theater if not for the scene that awaited me in the theater lobby.

Stephane says that dreams are made up of many things: randomness, things from your past, events from your day, “friendships, relationship, and all those ships.” The scene that awaited me in the lobby was very random, had elements of my childhood, and reminded me of something I was reading about earlier in the day.

I opened the door to the lobby and saw a packed room people with TV cameras and photographers gathered around an Asian woman with a rolled up poster in one hand. The some people in the crowd had their cellphone cameras ready for some big unveiling. The woman unrolled the poster and the crowd cheered. I moved around to try and see what the woman was holding up; it was a movie poster for Transformers: The Movie -not the new one coming out next year, but the 1986 animated movie. I then noticed that pretty much every person in the crowd was a white guy, between the ages of 25 and 35, slightly overwieght, wearing leather jackets and Optimus Prime T-shirts. I then remembered reading something in our school paper about a conference going on in town, BotCon, a Transformers convention.

There were some other Transformer things happening in the lobby, but I don’t remember exactly what they were. I just remember feeling uncomfortable.

image from imdb.com

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