The Science of Sleep

We recently watched The Science of Sleep with Gael Garcia Bernal (of Motorcycle Diaries). It's this kind of film that makes you fall in love with love stories.

Gael plays a sort of artist with a vivid imagination and some difficulty separating his dreams from reality. His dreams are beautiful and some were strangely familiar to my own dreams (particularly the one of him flying through a destructed city with open cement buildings). His character breaths life into the fantasy of being creative for the sake of creativity. His art isn't great, and his inventions aren't useful. But he shows us that living life in partial reality isn't so bad a way to live.

His creativity leads him to develop a relationship with his neighbor, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge Gainsbourg, the popular French singer of the 60's through 80's, which was one of the reasons I rented the movie).

Anyway their friendship is based solely on sharing a passion for making things. The purity of this arrangement is so charming it makes you want to fall in love all over again. Until the end it's unclear whether they'll ever be romantic together, but they make it apparent in their own dreamy way that they're as close to soul mates as one could hope for.

The originality of this movie was refreshing, and its innocence was heart-warming. A solid recommendation.