Listen: Devastations — I Don’t Want to Lose You Tonight
The scene: Televisión Educativa. The place: somewhere within Stephane Miroux’s dream scape, which bears an uncanny likeness to any morning infotainment program set, replete with musical accompaniment a la Laugh-In, a kitchen island for concocting potions and demonstration props galore. This is where Stephane narrates his own dream, recounting a story about his late father and he enjoying a Duke Ellington concert. It’s at once magical and farcical, yet poignant, so fresh is the memory of his father. Once again, director Michel Gondry treats us to his rare combination of mind/body gyrations, as well as the entanglements of history/memory, with more than a little sentimentality mixed in for good measure.
But is Homer’s Odyssey the only story where you actually can go home again, and triumphantly, no less? When Stephane returns home to be near his widowed mother, his Disasterologie artwork tucked under his arm, he’s immediately out of sorts and out of a job, just an unwilling patriarch in an unfamiliar place. To worsen matters, nightmare logic pervades his whole life; oftentimes his momentary happinesses are canceled by his hyperbolically comic regrets. The Science of Sleep unravels like a skein of yarn that encumbers Stephane and his alter-egos/friends, who share in his tragi-comedy.
As in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry concentrates on the importance of individual moments, each one loaded with meaning, regardless of its status as imagined or real, or in Stephane’s rare case, both at once. Stephane’s world, mediated by a peripatetic stream-of-consciousness, takes his tenuous grasp of reality to polar extremes. His romantic intensity is a high stakes game that those around him dare not play, either out of fear, as in his would-be lover Stephanie’s case, or out of a contentment with or resignation to the mundane realities of the workplace and the stultifying boredom that seems to define everything else.
In fact, Gondry’s stunning visual style transports the element from his best known work in music videos into a full-length feature to great effect. By reproducing dream logic both in its narrative absurdity and visual surrealism, we’re able to better understand Stephane’s frustration with an imperfect world. The contrast between dream and reality makes Stephane’s confusion all the more fantastic. Moreover, it gives us a glimpse into the brittle balance between Stephane’s compassion and narcissism informing his altruistic and possessive behaviors. Like Jared in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, dream logic and a child’s understanding of the world are often viewed as one in the same, a sort of idealized pre-conception of reality, and an untarnished Eden, free from intrusions.
Ultimately, Stephane’s contempt for lived reality poisons him to those he most cherishes. His dreams are feverish with paranoia; every offhand remark somehow betrays him, wounds him, haunts him. It’s a damning commentary on the current state of affairs, and not in some oversimplified, “Bush ‘n’ Blair hold hands in hell sense,” but one that addresses melancholy and apathy from a quasi-Situationist perspective. By taking the abstract and treating as valuable to psychic health as “relationships, friendships and all those ships,” Gondry mashes up Candide and Rasselas and leaves us to sort out what’s in between. All power to the imagination indeed.