REVIEWED: THE SCIENCE OF SLEEPMichel Gondry's latest, a messy but lively fantasy, is guaranteed not to put you to sleep, writes Donald Clarke

IT IS both a good and a bad thing that Michel Gondry's aggressively unusual film looks so much like the work of a spectacularly gifted infant. Featuring creatures fashioned from toilet rolls and brown paper, the lengthy dream sequences have about them the appearance of brilliant submissions to a school project. The Science of Sleep is infused with naive energy and, in its intricately worked busyness, calls to mind a nice young fellow pressing his creations on a favourite uncle: "Look what I've made! Will you look please!"

Sadly, the picture's undeniable charm is somewhat undermined by Gondry's stubborn refusal to offer us much in the way of order or logic. The Science of Sleep takes as its subject the affection Stéphane (Gael García Bernal, charming), a young Mexican recently arrived in Paris, has for Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg, gaunt), the girl who lives across the hall. By day, the handsome youth slaves at a boring job in a company that publishes bland calendars. In the evening he manufactures wondrous inventions - a time machine that transports the operator only seconds into the past - and plans ways to win his female complement's affections.

Or does he? The longer the film progresses, the more Stéphane's dreams begin encroaching on his waking life.

Now, it is, of course, true that many very great films have featured plots that tend towards the surreal or even the downright cuckoo bananas. But the best work of Luis Buñuel and David Lynch always seems to obey some internal logic that we might understand if only we had access to the Luisland Gazette or The Rough Guide to Lynchton.

Gondry - who, perhaps, needs the steadying influence of Charlie Kaufman, his writer on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to order his batty thinking - never convinces us that The Science of Sleep is much more than a random collection of wonderful visual gee-gaws.

Still, for all the disorder, barely a frame of the film passes without offering the viewer something worthy of his or her attention. Few messes are quite so attractive.