Michel Gondry's latest film, La science des rêves (The science of dreams), opened last Friday in Washington under its American title, The Science of Sleep. After an extended period working in the United States, notably in collaboration with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman on Human Nature and the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry has returned to his roots and set this film in his old stomping ground, the 18th arrondissement of Paris. As with all French directors who set up shop in America, French critics often referred to him as "le frenchie de Hollywood" when they reviewed his new movie last month.

Gondry directed The Science of Sleep from his own screenplay, and the result is intensely personal. He got his start making hallucinatory, fairy tale music videos for Björk and Beck and other one-named musicians. (You can watch many of his videos, commercials, and other clips via YouTube.) He brings that love of visual diversion to this movie, characterized by the inability of the protagonist, Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), to differentiate between his vivid dreams and reality, a condition that has plagued him since childhood according to his mother.

When he is asleep, Stéphane is the star of Télévision éducative, an oneiric talk show about his own life and peopled with the same faces who appear in real life. When his Mexican father and French mother separated, Stéphane left Paris to return to Mexico with his father. Now lured back to Paris by his mother's offer of a job as an illustrator, he lands in France to discover that the work is more dreary than creative, consisting only of adding a few lines of text to nude pinup calendars.

Embarrassed by his poor French after so many years in Mexico, Stéphane communicates mostly in a mixture of English, Spanish, and French. When he accidentally gets hurt trying to help movers lift a piano into the apartment across the landing from his mom's place, he encounters his new voisine de palier, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her friend Zoé (Emma de Caunes). Stéphanie becomes the object of his obsessions, and we follow the tortuous and obstacle-laden path to what I think is their eventual union, although it is far from clear.

Stéphane's coworkers in the calendar office seem to correspond to the Freudian divisions of his personality. In one sequence, Martine (Aurélia Petit) and Serge (Sacha Bourdo) tell Stéphane what caring and sensitive things he has to do to make Stéphanie fall in love with him. Sitting next to them, his shameless id, Guy (Alain Chabat), yells out, "Fuck her!" Chabat is famous in France for having created a group of comic actors in the late 1980s called Les Nuls, who made a series of fake television news shows, and his dry and acerbic wit is as sharp as it ever was. In one of the funniest scenes, Guy yells at a politician he hates on the television in his apartment. Fuming that the TV is ruining his weekend, he hauls it outside with Stéphane, where they hurl it into the Canal Saint-Martin.

Stéphane's real life is impossibly dreary by comparison to his fantasies, and Gondry may expend so much energy on the visually delightful animated sequences that the real story is shortchanged. In a feature article with Lynn Hirschberg in the New York Times last week, Gondry admitted that the story is based on a relationship from his own life. Like Stéphane, who is ultimately able to have his own illustrations made into a calendar (a hilarious project he calls Disasterology, with a famous earthquake, train wreck, or terrorist attack for each month of the year), Gondry has found a way to make his own fantasies real, and he never disappoints in terms of visual wonder. Now based in New York, Gondry has even made his artwork for the movie — all the props and sets used in the film — into an exhibit at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in SoHo, The Science of Sleep: an exhibition of sculpture and pathological creepy little gifts. It may be worth a trip to New York to see that before it closes on September 30.

Somewhat overshadowing her role in this movie in France, Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of Jane Birkin and legendary French poet-singer and mauvais garçon Serge Gainsbourg, has created quite a stir in the French media by finally releasing another album of songs this month, 5:55. Her face is a fascinating mixture of her beautiful mother and rather distinctive father, and she captures an excellent mixture of defensiveness and vulnerability as Stéphanie. The homemade bricolage of the dream sequences —' cardboard models of the television studio cameras and city of cars and monorails, acoustic tile made of egg cartons, hand-stitched animals that come to life as robots, swirls of crinkling cellophane as water — are quirky and endearing, as is the goofy, antisocial, and backwards character of Stéphane, played very well by Bernal.

Gondry's work could be called the cinematic equivalent of literature's magic realism, a filmed state that is recognizably our world but in which the normal rules of existence are malleable. This is probably why he has been so successful in the world of advertising and music videos, with this melding of fantasy and reality. Videos for Kylie Minogue (the singer is joined by her own Doppelgängers as she walks in circles around an intersection in Paris) and The White Stripes (Lego-based sequences) are good examples, and he did some of his funniest videos for the band he used to play drums for in Paris, Oui Oui. This movie has the same visual appeal wrapped around a troubled love story between two unlikely people.

The Science of Sleep is being shown only at Landmark's E Street Cinema. Check their Web site for show times.