When Michel Gondry swiped his hands and feet to say the ghost idea - "Press the delete button to remove the memory"; Kaufman let Jim Carey put on the helmet, walked into his subconscious and was driven by the power of the brainwashing machine, while trying to drive away the pain, On the other hand, we must seize happiness.
Kaufman proves to Michel Gondry with action: when the whole world doesn't understand you, only I, know how to crack your Da Vinci code, and turn all the threads in your head into the most intimate, human language; even if everyone I think you are weird, but I always understand your various subtexts or what you want to express next. So you talk to yourself about one or two ghost ideas, and I can add all kinds of retouching and fine-tuned plots to you right away.
Kaufman said to Michel Gondry: If you are just an abstract concept, then I am your representation.
So without Kaufman, Michel Gondry's ghostly ideas in Science of Sleep are scattered all over the place, like crumbs. With less cohesion, Wan Jun's gravity was instantly deflated and turned into a flickering old street lamp in the dark night. We will still applaud his "one second time machine", we will still snicker at his dream world, we will still laugh at his candy paper sea, forest ark, all kinds of wacky shit gag and applaud wonderful, even the disaster calendar we secretly long to have one.
However, when these kinds of amazing gadgets can't be broken down into pieces and become the turning points of the story's climax, and become purely funny little tricks or occasional props, we can't help but remember Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind is good, but Science of Sleep is a little less.
In contrast to its slender and sleek predecessor, Science of Sleep has a distinctly stronger personal touch to the director. Carrying out and extending his unsatisfactory experiments in the MV, in the movie he is actually more presumptuous and galloping like a mustang. The rough low-tech animation is completely anti-climax in the current atmosphere of "Lord of the Rings original CG stunts"; it is not him, I really can't think of anyone who would take such a bold challenge.
107 minutes of Michel Gondry's creativity without Kaufman's figurative presentation makes the audience feel lost. It is as uncomfortable and unpleasant as seeing the ball that was supposed to enter the gantry just brush the lintel, and the cheers get stuck in the throat. I think the most apt metaphor for Michel Gondry going to the meeting alone is that Haruki Murakami would not be Haruki Murakami without Lai Mingzhu.
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