Stephane comes to Paris from Mexico following his father's death, to live in a building owned by his mother. He's saddled with grief, a language barrier (Stephane speaks Spanish and English but very little French) and a mind-numbing job pasting logos onto calendars that his mother promised would appeal to his artistic sensibilities. Luckily, he's also got an attractive and shy neighbor named Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he's instantly smitten.
Stephane and Stephanie bond over their shared passion for eccentric art projects (Stephane pitches a calendar at work in which each month features a painting depicting a famous disaster), but the latter's shyness and the former's confusion (he at first thinks he has a thing for Stephanie's best friend) keep them apart.
If this sounds like your standard romantic comedy plot, in a lot of ways it is, and one of the strengths of Sleep is the way it takes certain romantic clichés and infuses them with excitement and creativity. While Stephane is not toiling away at his job or awkwardly attempting to romance Stephanie, he's living in a vivid dream world that often overlaps with the real one, a world in which he's in far more control than in reality, one where his annoying co-workers do his bidding, and Stephanie is madly in love with him.
It's in this world that Gondry, too, gets to be in control, filling the screen with surreal, whimsical images that fans of his music videos for Bjork, Foo Fighters and The White Stripes will instantly recognize. Without any computer effects, Gondry creates wild and sometimes hilarious depictions of Stephane's subconscious, which are both marvelous to watch and integral to the story, illuminating the worries and desires that drive Stephane in his waking life.
Although Stephane is clearly a Gondry surrogate, he doesn't always come off perfectly, and his dream-life and artistic pretensions clearly hold him back from happiness with Stephanie. A note that he writes to her while dreaming turns out to create real tension throughout the film, blurring notions of what is real and what is imagined. If Eternal Sunshine was about pursuing love despite the potential for heartbreak, Sleep is about leaving your own self-centered world to embrace the love that is right in front of you. Stephane is so enamored of his own cleverness that it often seems like he sees Stephanie as merely another art project and loves her most in his dreams when he's able to control her.
Despite (or perhaps because of) their shortcomings, you still root for Stephane and Stephanie to get together, but Gondry doesn't offer a pat resolution or an easy road ahead for his characters. What he does offer is a very funny and honest portrayal of romance among bohemians, in which the emotions are always clear and effective, even if the plotting isn't. Like the best dreams, it'll leave you a little dazed, and wishing you could close your eyes and put yourself back in its world.