To Sleep or not to Sleep?

As I am writing these words, I have been awake for nearly two days straight, and in that time I have managed to see no less than three films which take sleep (or lack thereof) as their very subject. Needless to say, this is sensitive territory for the festival-going critic. My itinerary began with The Science of Sleep, in which an aspiring artist named Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) returns to France from Mexico at the behest of his mother, lands a dead-end job working a typesetting machine at an ad agency and finds himself falling in love with the quirky Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who makes him so nervous he can't even bring himself to tell her he lives in the apartment right across the hall. The film is directed by Michel Gondry, the enormously talented music video director who two years ago teamed up with writer Charlie Kaufman for a little ditty called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here, as there, Gondry takes us deep into that dense matter between his protagonist's ears, and the elaborate fantasy sequences that unfold therein rival Sunshine for their freewheeling absurdist brio: Entire cities are constructed of miniature buildings and toy cars; an anthropomorphic electric razor adds hair to your body instead of taking it away; and Stephane is indisputably master of his domain. Nobody is trying to vacuum out any of his memories, mind you, but like Jim Carrey's Joel Barish, Stephane finds it easier to express himself in his dream life than in his waking one, especially when it comes to his love for Stephanie. I'm generally in agreement with those who feel that Gondry — loosed from Kaufman and Spike Jonze and more or less given carte blanche by the French film studio Gaumont — has a penchant to overindulge his flights of visual fancy, though I'd still rather journey through his overindulgences than, say, Terry Gilliam's bar none. But the soul of Gondry's work — and the thing that makes The Science of Sleep, warts and all, one of the two or three truly indispensable films to emerge out of Sundance so far this year — is its richly imaginative and painfully felt understanding of a generation hopelessly tongue-tied when it comes to matters of the heart.

From Sleep, I segued to Wide Awake, another gloriously eccentric achievement by the documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner, who once made a film (The Sweetest Sound) about everyone else in the world who has the same name as he does, and who always manages to make a movie primarily about himself and his own neuroses no matter what he sets out to do. Here, the subject is Berliner's battle with insomnia and his lifelong efforts to overcome it — from counting sheep to aromatherapy to alcohol and sex. Nothing works, but then again, Berliner isn't entirely sure he'd like to adjust to a more normal schedule of wake and sleep, given that it is in the wee morning hours that nearly all of his films have been put together. Along the way, there are humorous asides about a one-time global campaign to find the cure for jet lag and Berliner's own personal theory that the oft-iterated phrase "human error" may be but a metaphor for fatigue.

No doubt the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, In the Heat of the Night) would be among the first to agree with Berliner. Exactly six hours after the conclusion of the midnight screening of Wide Awake, having spent that interim time back in my condo writing, I returned to the exact same Sundance festival theater and sat in the exact same seat for an 8 AM screening of Wexler's aptly-titled Who Needs Sleep? — and suffice it to say that, unlike Berliner's film, Wexler's is no laughing matter. Inspired by the tragic deaths of Hollywood film crew members who have been killed in auto accidents caused by falling asleep at the wheel, Who Needs Sleep? is an impassioned, angry plea for more humane working hours in an industry prone to resorting to sweatshop tactics all in the name of "getting the shot." At any hour of the day or night, Wexler's film is, no pun intended, a powerful wake-up call, not just for the movie industry, but for an entire nation that once fought passionately for the 8-hour work day and now, ever more willingly, works itself to death. Certainly, I was convinced. After soldiering on from Wexler's screening through three other movies, by the time I finally stumbled into my first party of this year's festival that night, I walked right up to one critic colleague, mistook him for a Warner Independent Pictures executive to whom he bears a passing resemblance, and asked him if it was true that he had closed a deal to buy the U.S. distribution rights to The Science of Sleep. And as I write this, the keys on my computer keyboard are starting to blur and dance about in a most Gondry-an manner.

More to come. But for now, off to bed.

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