Michel Gondry's follow-up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is visually arresting but dramatically aimless and ultimately infuriating.
It takes place partly, or perhaps wholly, in the mind of Gael García Bernal's Stéphane, a disturbed child-man whose slumbering fantasies - characterised by naïve but intricate cardboard animation and nightmarishly skewed perspectives - start to bleed into his "real" life.
He has a boring job with peculiar colleagues at a Parisian calendar publishers, but he also invents rubbishy time machines and mechanical endo-skeletons for stuffed toys.
He is by turns shy, flirtatious, coarse and aggressive with his neighbour Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who is herself a bit off the wall. Or is she? What is real and what is fantasy? Who knows? Who cares?
I suspect what Gondry is trying for here is something that reflects the workings of the unconscious mind, or at least the butterfly ingenuity of the infant's imagination.
That would account for the rambling, repetitive structure, the often childish jokes, and the Freudian overtones.
It's all lovely to look at, but becomes progressively wearisome.
Oh, and the dialogue flits between French, Spanish and English. Perhaps this was dictated by the casting of Bernal and Gainsbourg.
Or perhaps Gondry did it just to make his film that bit more kooky.
The Science Of Sleep
Cert: 15
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