the science of sleep

Sometimes you have to be in the right frame of mind to watch certain movies.

I'm not entirely sure I was in the right frame of mind to watch The Science of Sleep.

The film is French, I believe, although the main character, Stephane, was actually raised mostly in Mexico. This means that although he speaks some French, mostly he speaks in English. The film therefore has a fairly random mix of English and French with subtitles.

But this is the least of the randomness. Stephane it seems has quite an active dream life. I personally am one of those people who almost never remembers their dreams, but Stephane is almost the opposite - he seems to live partly in his dreams and sometimes has trouble telling them apart from real life.

Now this is a tricky thing to convey on film - especially for a lower budget film like this. A modern Hollywood film might achieve the effect with expensive CGI, but here they tend to use more old school stuff, so we get lots of stop motion and rear-projection and stuff like that.

Overall it actually works quite well. There are occasions when you can't quite tell whether it's meant to be the dream world or the real world, but those are clearly deliberate. When it wants you to know it's dream, it's fairly clear, and when it wants to blur the lines, that works well too.

What doesn't quite work so well is the plot.

The basic plot is a romance at heart, with Stephane chasing his neighbour, Stephanie (yeah, I know). However, Stephanie seems to be a bundle of contradictions. She clearly like Stephane and there are lots of moments of them enjoying each other's company and having fun.

But then when he expresses more interest in her, she withdraws and discourages him. At points this seems to be because she thinks he's actually trying to use her to get to her friend, but then later on this seems to be a rather rubbish reason. Most especially because at one point the film moves forward a month and yet there relationship seems to be still stuck on the same basic issue.

Also, there's a lot of stuff that happens that feels unresolved or random. Stephane's relationship with his mother is never fully explained. His job is also bizarre. It's a rubbish job, and he basically stops doing it, but then later an idea he had somehow becomes a big success. But after that success, he's back to avoiding the same job he was in.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But the thing is, I'm not sure if that was supposed to be the idea - I mean, is this the film of someone who's having some sort of breakdown? People around him never really seem to comment on the bizarre elements, and yet they're often involved in them too.

As I say - I think I might have liked this film more, but I wasn't quite in the right mood for it.