Deadly Hymns

It took me years after watching Fallen starring Denzel Washington to listen to The Rolling Stones' "Time Is On My Side" without my blood curdling. Last night we watched Night of the Hunter, and it's going to be a long time before I hear "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" the same way again. *shudder* Have you had any songs take on alternative, eerie meanings for you in similar ways?

The Science of Sleep

How many movies do we actually end up rewatching? There are movies I think are utter masterpieces I've seen only once. Movies I truly love, I've probably only seen between two and four times. It's really only the lighter fare (Super Troopers, Dazed and Confused, The Warriors, etc.) that I've given the once every 4-6 week treatment to, and then for finite periods of time. No matter how much you might have changed since your last viewing, sometimes, there just doesn't seem to be a point to spending another two hours immersed in a world you've already visited.

SM hadn't seen Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep before, so when it was playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center last week, we decided to take advantage. I adore Michel Gondry's imagination and visual creations, but it hadn't been one of the movies I'd really put a lot of thought into rewatching. The first and last time I'd seen it, I'd come away both defensive and disappointed. Gondry's music videos and general DIY arts approach to filmmaking has been influential for me ever since I saw the White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl video" in 2001. I was floored when Eternal Sunshine came out in 2004, and bought the Criterion Collection of his short videos as soon as I could. Needless to say, with his body of work in mind combined with my intense crush on star Gael Garcia Bernal, expectations were high when Science of Sleep came out in 2006. Instead of having those expectations met, however, I left the theater unable to explain what I'd just seen. I thought it was muddled and disorganized in spite of its incredible set design and animation techniques, which I'd seen as its only redeeming element. I answered my doubts with a dismissive familiarity with Gondry's work: "what else did I really expect? With such a creative mind as his, it's hard to have so many ideas, such an expansive vision, and keep it cohesive and in check." I went into this second viewing excited to enter his world again, but didn't expect much from the movie itself.

This time, I was truly impressed. Instead of fighting through my own expectations, I was able to watch the film with a much more discerning eye. There was so much reality going on just under the surface that did a lot to support the whole premise, so many details I hadn't caught before that make each choice much more intentional than I had given it credit for.

The film opens with French-Mexican Stephane Miroux (Bernal) moving to Paris to be with his mother after his father dies of cancer in Mexico. He moves into his childhood room in his mother's former apartment in a building she owns, and starts a job she sets up for him. He is a creative type and likes to draw, invent, and make things with his hands, a hobby he has had since he was a child (he turns off the light switch from his bed with an elaborate pulley system attached to a mallet). The job turns out to be much less fulfilling than he'd expected, and he is continually stymied by his inadequate French. Things quickly get a lot more interesting, though, when he meets his neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), from across the hall as she's moving in. She originally thinks he is part of the moving crew when he ends up helping (and hurting) her moving efforts and getting himself hurt in the process, and invites him in to have her attractive friend, Zoe, tend his wound. While Stephanie is attracted to him, he is initially attracted to Zoe, creating a bit of a triangle. After he gets to know Stephanie a bit more and sees her creative pursuits, though, he begins to change his mind.

The variable that takes the movie on a loop is the surrealistic elements of the film. From the beginning, we are treated to the view from inside Stephane's head. In his mind he has his own television show, complete with cardboard sets, on which he is the host, cooking up the ingredients of his day into dreamy concoctions that lead to DIY-style fantasy sequences about his father and his new surroundings as he sleeps. As the film progresses, though, those fantasies blend with reality to calamitous results. Just as things are getting friendly with Stephanie, he nakedly sleepwalks across the hall and slips a dream-written note under her door, in which he spouts a lot of nonsense but manages to close with asking for Zoe's number. The crux of the ensuing misunderstanding is here, but the viewer doesn't realize it yet: unbeknownst to Stephane, Stephanie read the note before he realized his mistake and retrieved it from under her door. As he falls for Stephanie and tries to spend more time with her, we realize that she saw the note as a sign that he's not interested in her and that they are just friends, so she rebuffs his advances. Stephane's dreamworld continues to unknowingly muddle his reality, and he becomes more and more confused and heartbroken as the movie unfolds, ultimately spoiling the chance he does get with Stephanie because he is so wrapped up in his own head.

What I hadn't realized before is how much goes into muddling the viewer's sense of reality right along with Stephane's. Often in surrealistic films, the viewer is above it all, aware of what is real and what isn't, even if the characters aren't. This is usually done by spending close to equal amount of time in both the real and fantastical world. In The Science of Sleep, we know that Stephane is spending too much time in his dreamworld, but we don't really realize how much time we're not spending in the real world either. Only snatches of the real world are visible, and noticing them the second time around really grounded the movie for me and put Stephane's detachment from reality in perspective. We see Stephanie's setup to getting angry and frustrated in small snatches that only amount to a few minutes of screen time. We see Stephane's coworkers annoyed that he hasn't been reliable at work for another few measly minutes sprinkled throughout. We see Stephane's mother argue with her boyfriend for only a few seconds before she ends up moving back into the apartment she shared with her son long ago. These glimpses are enough reality on second viewing to make Stephane's situation bigger than he is, and it gives the film more depth.

Another layer of complexity I hadn't noticed before was language. The first time I saw the film, I attributed the muddled dialogue to English being Gondry's second language. Now I see that the distinctive ESL flavor to the script underscores Stephane's state of mind, both in his life as a transplant from Mexico who recently lost his father, and from his perch between reality and his dreamworld. Throughout the film he pushes the boundaries of his French with everyone he meets and is forced to settle for their common second language, English. Even with his mother, he can understand her French, but he would much prefer to express himself to her in English. In his conversations with Stephanie, both of them take thought to find the right English words to express the inner monologues that no doubt take place in their own first languages. (It seemed as if the actors improvised a lot of their conversation, which expertly added to this effect.) Stephane's limitations with language make his way into his dreams as well: he speaks to his father in Spanish and English, and his French coworkers' fantastical counterparts speak in a mush-mouthed mockery of French. Stephane is disoriented both literally and figuratively, and his dreams take the concept and run with it.

Overall, I liked this movie much more than I had the first time. Without the constraints of expectations and with the freedom to let go of the plot and notice the details, I was able to really appreciate all of the layers that Michel Gondry was able to employ to support his vision. I was also able to appreciate how impressive it is to write and present a film that is utterly and unforgivingly of the moment and in the head of the narrator, something I've really begun to appreciate after reading Proust. (Some Proustian ideas of love are in here too, but that could be a whole other pretentious blog post.) We are not omniscient in this film; we are tied to Stephane in a way that limits our scope, and we are only given hints of the objective situation. Of course all of the visual aspects, the animation and the characters' tactile sensibilities were still amazing and on par with what I love about Gondry's work. But this time I was able to walk away confident that the movie was impressive beyond my presumptions. It's a film I look forward to rewatching.