The first item of business is to slap the title translator of "La Science de reves" up the side of his or her head with a Larousse: It is not "The Science of Sleep" but the science of dreams that brings us and Gael Garcia Bernal together here.

	Etienne George Charlotte Gainsbourg, left, is Stephanie and Gael Garcia Bernal is Stephane in "The Science of Sleep." Click photo for larger image. 'The Science of Sleep' Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Director: Michel Gondry. Rating: R for language, some sexual content and nudity. Web site: wip.warnerbros.com/scienceofsleep

The second caveat is Euclidian: Whereas the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Michel Gondry's anti-geometric journey from first to final plot point takes the somnambulist serpentine route.

Except for elements of phantasmagoric style, this romantic comedy has little in common with the director's celebrated "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), nor does its hero have the gravitas of "Sunshine's" Jim Carrey.

Bernal plays callow young Stephane, still wearing his incongruous Mexican-Indian hat as a red badge of protest against being lured back to Paris by his mother (Miou-Miou) for a bait-and-switch design job he instantly hates. To escape it -- at least in his sleep -- he hosts his own private "Stephane TV" cooking show, during which he tosses everything into a pot bubbling and psychobabbling over with reves and reveries.

Stephane, in short, is a guy whose reality is trumped by his dreams and the people in them, running amok in their "parallel synchronized randomness." Chief among those people is diffident Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his soul-named, if not soulmate, next-door neighbor who makes cloth telephones and blankets with moving animals but can't cope with his pathological inversion of dreams and reality.

Stephane's dream footsteps are dogged by a trio of "design" colleagues from the office, who complement and complicate the images: cellophane water spurts out of his faucets, a monstrously huge typewriter chases him, a cardboard camera follows and records everything. Best in show: a mad-scientist time machine that lets Stephane and Stephanie rewind or fast-forward their key moments with each other -- reminiscent of Lacuna Inc.'s memory erasure in "Sunshine."

Bernal is a delightfully innocent reincarnation of Truffaut's Jean-Pierre Leaud in all this, sleeping in his childhood crib of a bed, terminally awkward in his outdated leisure suit, always saying the wrong or inappropriate thing to Gainsbourg -- in three tongues. The film's dialogue moves from French to English to Spanish enchantingly, with Bernal's fine delivery of slightly askew vocabularies: "I hate it when you speak to me in different languages," he says. "It makes me feel schizometric."

In any language, his character is always just a bit "off," like a dissonant Stravinsky or a cubist Picasso, always longing and failing to win Stephanie's heart.

The lovely, childlike animation of this magic realism is part music video, part Monty Python and part Austin Powers -- playful and peripatetic to the point of frantic. It's all about the mind-boggling, eye-dazzling images. The existential ending is not so much from the intention of the invention as from exhaustion.

The trouble with virtuosic tour-de-force storytelling is that you've got to have a virtuosic story -- like "Eternal Sunshine" or "Donnie Darko" -- to tell. While gorgeous to look at and highly enjoyable, "The Science of Sleep" lacks such a compelling narrative, except in its wildest dreams.