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In a sense, that explains the collaboration between Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Kaufman constructed the elegant labyrinth for Gondry to run boldly through, exploring every branching pathway and bumping into dead ends to infuse it with the urgency of life, the two seemingly cross purposes colliding and correcting for each other. For his first narrative feature sans Kaufman, Gondry eschews the intricately designed puzzle box of the prior film for a handcrafted, patched-together maze, which he doesn't so much navigate as tear his way right through the walls.

FLOAT ON: Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) and his never waking life.

Some of those walls are quite literal; Stéphane is introduced on the cardboard-and-egg-crates TV studio set that is the home base for his dreams. The windows look out onto Stéphane's real life or his memories, and it soon becomes apparent that they permit passage in either direction. Stéphane is a dreamer of the most determined stripe, his waking and sleeping lives inseparably intertwined. The border between the two is often hard to determine, but in the larger picture it's wholly irrelevant since Stéphane can't seem to figure it out either.

His father having lost his struggle with cancer, Stéphane moves to France from Mexico to stay with his mother, who has promised she's found him a job doing illustrations for a calendar company. He's divorced from corporate reality enough to imagine that his series of "disasterology" paintings, depicting famous plane crashes and earthquakes and the like, could make for a popular calendar. But the job turns out to be simple typesetting, and gradually he only shows up for work when he's dreaming.

A mishap involving a piano delivery introduces Stéphane to his neighbor Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he begins an uncertain romance, at first deflecting his attraction onto her friend Zoé (Emma de Caunes). Their courtship progresses with the herky-jerky illogic of Stéphane's subconscious, Stéphanie at a distinct disadvantage since a good deal of her end of the relationship is played out by an imaginary surrogate.

Given Gondry's background in music, it's surely no accident that he's cast the daughter of French pop iconoclast Serge Gainsbourg, and Stéphanie's emotional reticence would certainly make sense in a woman who was singing duets about incest with her father at age 14. But it's Stéphanie's openness to and indulgence of Stéphane's flights of fancy that forms the basis for their attraction (as he tells her at one point, she's "the only person who's not boring"). Significantly, she's the only character who enters willingly into the dream state with Stéphane, the only one, in fact, who can see it almost as vividly as he can. Both are receptive to the whimsical in daily life as well; The surprisingly musical policeman who discovers that her damaged piano now only plays minor chords is almost as fantastic a conceit as the chord Stéphane finds that can suspend cotton clouds in the air.

Both, too, are reluctant to admit their obvious mutual attraction. This is a love story played out in a series of wrong moves and miscommunications, which for the most part are never resolved but absorbed into the fabric of the couple's instinctual connection. Gondry's strength here, as in Sunshine, is in capturing the kaleidoscopic tumble of emotions and perceptions that make up someone's experience of another person. By setting the film squarely behind Stéphane's eyes, Gondry presents the self-doubt and speculation and hope and disappointment at the same time as the "objective" reality.

Bernal's performance is most remarkable when he's forced to exist in the real world, when the confident, avuncular emcee that he becomes in his mind is trapped behind the shy, scared eyes of the overgrown little boy that he really is. The same imaginative leaps that give birth to the creative curios that so enchant Stéphanie also spawn his paranoia and erratic behavior. Stéphane, sleeping in his childhood room and given to playing with toys, possesses not just the sweetness of a child but the impulsive cruelty as well. The question that hangs over the film is whether the Stéphane that he imagines for himself can survive the one who keeps tripping over his outer life.

Gondry the music video director, responsible for innovative clips for Björk, the White Stripes and the Chemical Brothers, re-emerges for The Science of Sleep. Where Sunshine is a finely crafted song whose depth of meaning arises from a confluence of structure and content, Sleep pulses with the messy vitality of a rock beat, as sloppy and electrifying as anything onstage at some hazy underground nightclub.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)