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.