FILM SCREENINGS

The Science of Sleep

2006. France/Italy. Written and directed by Michel Gondry. Gael García Bernal plays Stéphane, who inhabits both reality and his own self-manufactured dream world. He is the host of Stéphane Television, including a cooking segment in which he mixes up a dream in a boiling pot. Stéphane, whose philosophy of "parallel synchronized randomness" embraces the futility of free will, believes he cannot control anything. Yet in his fantasies he is able to manipulate the passage of time, the lives of his coworkers, and his own dreams—but not the elusive love of his beautiful neighbor. Dalí's own paranoiac-critical method, a theoretical philosophy that investigates the simultaneity of various planes of consciousness, would doubtlessly appeal to Stéphane. In French, Spanish, English; English subtitles. 105 min.