If I've learned two things from watching Michel Gondry's (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) semi-autobiographical The Science of Sleep, one is that Gondry can look at any everyday object and turn it into a piece of a fantasy dream-world puzzle. The other thing -- once Gondry gets going with his intrinsic mindscapes, there's no telling where he'll go, or when he'll stop.

Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mama Tambien) plays Stephane -- a native of Mexico who has moved to France to be closer to his recently widowed mother. He takes what he thinks will be a creative graphic design job that ends up being a mundane, artistically stifling career arranging nude calendars.

As the plot unfolds, Stephane falls in love with his across the hall neighbor Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) for mostly reasons at face-value: They have similar names, they both enjoy creating things with their hands and both are in creatively hindering, dead-end jobs.

Bernal's interpretation of the child-like innocence in Stephane is something to behold as he unwaveringly delivers immature and anxious lines with an almost inborn comical overtone.

The plot hinges on Stephane's inability to separate dreams from reality and his struggle to separate the two while trying to win over a girl he thinks he loves. The obstacle of dream vs. reality that Stephane experiences is portrayed in greater frequency toward the beginning of the movie and less near the end as he begins to grasp reality.

Through Gondry's use of naturalistic special effects, such as frequent dreams where the city skyline is made of cardboard and water is made of cellophane, and through the use of three separate languages--French, English and Spanish--in the dialogue, confusion is abundant.

The intuitive effects that made Eternal Sunshine unique make Gondry's latest effort seemingly confusing. However, if taken in the context of the film, these dream-like creations are expertly used to transport us into the mind of Stephane and truly feel his despair.

We see Stephane as a highly impressionable person whose dreams are a twisted alternate reality of his mind as compared to his mundane reality. Stephane's confusion of these two worlds also leaves the audience confused, until in the end we see it was all in service of Stephane's uncertainty in the midst of a tragic love story.

The bulk of Gondry's work has to do with love and all of its complexities which is portrayed in the film in a very humanistic sense and many can relate to the connections of emotions through dreams.

However, Gondry has also dealt with the music video aesthetic for much of his career as well and his visual artistry, although somewhat purposeful, seems to still go a bit overboard and at times can make the viewer feel they're watching a 105-minute music video.

Some might put the film side by side with Eternal Sunshine and say Sleep is a comparably lesser version, but I think the film holds it's own as a visually unparalleled piece of French cinema stemming from the unique and personal mind of director/writer Michel Gondry. Grade: B-