The Science of Sleep (Michael Gondry, 2006)

Sometimes, when I try to look at a star – I can see it clearly out of the corner of my eye, or I can catch it in my peripheral vision – but when I try to focus on it, it sort of evaporates and there just isn’t enough to focus on, even though I know it’s there.

That’s the way it is with my dreams too. I have a tendency to forget them immediately after I experience them. I wake up and the dream is there, so real I have trouble believing I didn’t just live through it – then in almost measurable increments it slips away piece by piece until it’s gone.

In The Science of Sleep, Stephane, a Mexican who returns to Paris to live with his French mother, has the opposite problem.

Since his childhood, his mother explains to a friend, Stephane, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, has “inverted” dream life and waking life – mixing the two together until he is unsure which is which.

The power of his imagination lends his dreams a sharp, vivid realness that he can’t escape, even outside of sleep, and that draws the viewer into the crazy cut and paste world of his imagination.

This tendency begins to complicate his life when he falls in love with Stephanie -- Charlotte Gainsbourg – his new neighbour across the hall, and begins confusing their real life interactions with those he has only imagined.

Michael Gondry, who expertly directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, along with a ton of music videos, takes us right inside Stephane’s dreams. And you feel like you’re there.

Using recycled, everyday materials like milk cartons, toilet paper tubes and cellophane, Gondry creates beautiful make-believe worlds that are so dream-like they help me recapture pieces of the ones I forgot.

There’s a beautiful scene where Stephane and Stephanie become excited about a project they want to work on together with old packing materials and old toys she has around her apartment. Their enthusiasm is infectious, as they describe how cotton balls could become clouds, pieces of cellophane could serve as the sea and how a small wooden boat could be filled with a forest to create a “vegetable Noah’s Ark,” Stephane explains breathlessly.
And as they run around picking up materials and planning it out the scene comes to life in simple, child-like animated goodness.

I got excited too and found myself planning my own little animated film sequence and convincing myself I was actually going to do it (mine involved a Lite-Brite).

His favourite dream involves a TV show where he is the host, camera-man and director, and the people in his life are the guests.

Stephane’s dreams run his life – to the detriment of his job cutting and pasting generic calendar components together – his strange pseudo-relationship with Stephanie, and even his day-to-day activities.

He never really outgrew the imaginary friends and imaginary life he created for himself when he was a kid, and as a result the cute factor wears off quick and he becomes somewhat frustrating to watch.

The aesthetic appeal of this film makes it worth watching – it really will blow your mind in a manageable way – but the story is a bit weak, the breakthrough you hope Stephane will make never really happens, and the ending is unsatisfying.

That being said it’s a feast for the senses, with dialogue flipping seamlessly between English, French and Spanish, beautifully rendered dream sequences and a meshing of fantasy and reality that will have you saying “what the..?” in a good way.

Why the Banff Mountain Film Festival helps me survive Toronto

I’ve been inspired for three days now, full of dreams of the mountains and adventures and freedom, thinking back to places I’ve been and those that capture my imagination and call out to me to visit.

It’s pretty much the way I feel every year for a week or so after the Banff Mountain Film Festival comes to town. I’ve been going to the festival for years now – five of the last six I think -- and have sought it out in Kingston, Barrie and Toronto, depending on the location closest to wherever I happened to be living at the time. It’s always been worth the drive and never fails to leave me dreaming of a better life.

That’s how I feel now, after my brother Ben and I attended the festival last Saturday at the Bloor Cinema.

The festival ran three nights in a row here in Toronto, with a different lineup of adventure or outdoors-inspired films each night, running over about a four-hour span.

The roster typically includes a mix of six or seven Canadian and international films, ranging from a couple of minutes in length to an hour or so, and there are usually a couple of slightly eccentric entries that don’t fit neatly into the genre, but usually still work pretty well with the overall theme.

There were three films this year that really captured my imagination and have occupied my thoughts for nearly a week now.

The first was called “Asiemut,” a film made by a young couple from Quebec as they travelled by bicycle through (check my geography) Mongolia, China, Tibet, Nepal and India – 8,000 kilometres – and got through thick and thin together and came out stronger on the other side. A truly inspiring film and a really likeable pair of Quebecois (not that that’s unusual.)

The second, and this fits in the category of “Adventure?? Film” is called “The Ride of the Merganser. Mergansers are a diving duck that call, among other places, the northwestern portion of the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S. home.

They’re pretty elusive and as such there isn’t a ton of footage of them in their natural habitat – and there’s definitely nothing like this. ROTM, a 15 minute film, follows a female as she lays eggs, hatches her ducklings, and urges them one by one to make the long leap from the nest down to the pond below – all in the space of 24 hours.

It’s so cool! Clever narration, a smart soundtrack and brilliant use of remote cameras make this one of the most purely entertaining films of the festival, for sure.

But my far-and-away favourite was undoubtedly “First Ascent: Didier versus The Cobra.”

Most of this hour-long film takes place in Squamish, B.C., and centres around Didier Berthod, a Swiss rock climber, and his attempts to climb “The Cobra” – a section of rock split from top to bottom by a narrow crack just large enough to get a toe and a couple of fingers into in places, and possibly the toughest crack climb in the world.

But the documentary-style film quickly becomes about more than achieving that one finite goal. Didier, who is living at a youth hostel and cleaning rooms to pay for his stay so he can hang around and climb, is instantly lovable, and the film-maker does an incredible job of bringing us into Didier’s life and showing us who he is, beyond being a world-class climber who appears to have been born on a rock somewhere.

At one point he tells the camera “I’m a Christian, but not a very good one,” and you can’t help but admire his ability to wear his heart on his sleeve.

The film follows Didier as he attempts, over and over again, to scale The Cobra (which had never been climbed), to the heartbreaking moment when he fails on his very last attempt before he has to fly home to Switzerland.

The story then takes us to Europe, where he climbs the toughest crack-climb in Europe, but only after Didier – a pure traditionalist -- removes the bolts that someone has driven into the rock to make the climb easier.

Then, after a year, he comes back to Squamish, and your pulse begins to quicken as you anticipate, finally, his success on the still-unclimbed route.

But like a quick-draw coming loose it all comes crashing down on his first day back, when he injures his knee and learns he won’t be climbing for months.

Then Didier has an epiphany, explaining that he had convinced himself his desire to climb The Cobra, to be the first, was the natural result of his love of the outdoors and the connection he feels to the rock.

But now, he says, he realizes it was all about “the glory.” He wanted to be the first. He wanted to be the best, and God used the opportunity to humble him.

“It’s as if He was saying ‘No Didier, it’s not for you,’” he says. And there were moments, at “the crux” of the climb – a one-finger hold that transitions to a slippery overhanging right-hand hold, where he felt as if the angels were gently pushing him down, because they knew it wasn’t his time.

“So, instead, I am here to be God’s witness,” Didier says with his typical, simple wisdom that runs deep.

Ahh man, it’s a beautiful film, and even writing about it makes me want to go out and climb a rock, or paint a picture or write a poem or move back to Banff.

See, that’s why I’ve driven halfway across the province to attend the BMFF – because it always breaks my heart and makes me cry and in the words of the great Wade Davis, helps me “understand what it means to be human, and to be alive.”

I’m getting carried away but you get the idea. If you like the outdoors, or have the tiniest remnant of an adventurous spirit left in your black corporate soul, or if you just need to escape this damn city and you don’t have the means to get out – do yourself a huge favour and go to the festival next year.

You won’t regret it.