In his two films with Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry explored the boundaries of love within cultural assumptions (Human Nature) and the corners love inhabits in memory (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). For his latest film, The Science of Sleep, Gondry tracks love as it moves from a young man's personal dreamscape into reality.

It could have been a perfect trilogy — except that Gondry didn't use the mad, visionary talent of Kaufman, and instead wrote his own script, which was a fatal error. While The Science of Sleep is a beautiful, at times exquisite film to watch, it groans under the yoke of banal and forcibly whimsical dialogue. In other words, Gondry has gone to great trouble to be dull in a new way.

A young French-Mexican artist, Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), returns to Paris after his mother (a squandered Miou-Miou) finds him a job working for a calendar company. Stéphane believes that his work, fanciful art brut apocalypses, could be the very thing the company needs for its calendars. He soon finds out that the company specializes in pirating nude images of women for its product.

The juxtaposition of the physical world with the metaphysical one is, of course, perfect Kaufman territory. Gondry had an idea that in Kaufman's hands would have multiplied into myriad ideas about waking life and dreaming, and which might be the truer "reality." Gondry is a master at manipulating images, but hasn't a clue how to articulate the ideas they spawn. The Science of Sleep is filled with the spirit of invention without a solid body for it to imbue.

The opening credits are certainly the most promising of any recent film. Stéphane is found to be the host of a television show of his life that operates within his mind at night. The set, down to the studio camera, is all fashioned from cardboard. In fact, Gondry cleverly uses common pieces of material throughout to construct Stéphane's dreamland. Even the young painter's canvases of disintegrating cities will start to become Paris.

There are pieces of stagecraft in The Science of Sleep that are true genius. Yet, as the images must carry the weight of the entire film, they can quickly seem like desperate exercises in decoration, almost aggressively so. The subtlety of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — such as when all the books in the shop where Clementine works suddenly turn completely white, as the title and author names dissolve from the covers — is absent here. Also, that marvelous effect occurs on the margin of the scene, as something for viewers to discover on their own. By comparison, Science becomes a blatant hemorrhage of images for an audience that Gondry doesn't seem to trust will "get it."

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the talented cast that Gondry has failed to fully utilize. Bernal is one of contemporary cinema's finest young actors, yet here he's confined in a role that seems to demand of him only that he be handsome. The character of Stéphane is sketchily drawn at best. Though Gondry seems to believe otherwise, there's nothing winning about a young artist clinging to aspects of his adolescence that often seem boorishly infantile.

The women fare worse. The excellent Miou-Miou is given little to do as Stéphane's mother, while Aurélia Petit (a superb actress recently seen in Valérie Minetto's Oublier Cheyenne) is reduced to animated décor as one of Stéphane's colleagues. The equally talented Gainsbourg appears to have been instructed to play Stéphanie plain and plaintive.

It's a shame, really, because there's such occasional richness to The Science of Sleep that it evidently could have made a potent addition to the earlier Gondry/Kaufman work. As it stands, Gondry's latest is