C-

Michel Gondry has made quite a name for himself as a result of his collaborations with the overrated Charlie Kaufman, with whom–as this solo effort demonstrates–he shares an affinity for cutely bizarre brain-teasers that turn out to be much less clever and profound than they pretend to be. “The Science of Sleep,” a story about a dreamy young naif named Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) who stumbles between reality and fantasy in trying to deal with the demands of a boring new job and a halting romance with a vivacious neighbor named Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is really nothing more than a phantasmagorical reworking of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Using lots of deliberately tacky effects and goofy imagery, it tries to be more giddy and effervescent than Danny Kane’s elephantine 1947 version of that James Thurber tale, but never achieves the light, airy feel it’s aiming for. There’s a fine line between the sweetly weird and the coyly oddball, and Gondry’s film falls on the wrong side of it.

In Godry’s frail conceit, Stephane is an abstracted would-be artist who comes from Mexico to Paris, where he’s to live in a flat in a building owned by his mother (Miou-Miou), who’s also secured him a job which, she’s promised, will be a creative one. But when the young man shows up at the firm–a calendar company–he finds that the owner (Pierre Vaneck) has no interest in his peculiar notion for a spread (a series of colorful drawings depicting twelve disasters), and he’s assigned a task that requires nothing but repetitive printing duties. The only liveliness is provided by bickering colleagues Guy (Alain Chabat), Martine (Aurelia Petit) and Serge (Sacha Bourdo).

It’s no wonder that Stephane takes to daydreaming; but his more protracted imaginings are actual dreams about his new neighbor (Gainsbourg), even though he’s initially more intrigued by her more volatile friend Zoe (Emma de Caunes). His fantasies take more and more elaborate forms–often with him as the host of a pretended television talk show, but sometimes involving his literally flying through colorful, pleasantly surrealistic landscapes–while he spends much of his supposedly waking hours cobbling together little inventions for Stephanie, like a machine that ostensibly moves time back or forward by a single second or motors that animate the woman’s beloved toy horse. The last act tries to draw a bittersweet conclusion to their on-and-off near-romance, but by the close the whimsy has long since started to curdle.

One has to admire the facility with which Gondry fills many of his film’s frames with imagery apparently fashioned from the most ordinary items–cardboard packages, cotton, styrofoam–and the animation by Studio Suzette Gondry Villemagne has an appropriately children’s-book look; Jean-Michel Bernard’s bouncy music adds to the package. The cast is fine, too, with Bernal taking on a sad-sack persona well enough and Gainsbourg expertly exhibiting a more mature, but still playful attitude. Prime support comes from Chabat as Stephane’s droll, opinionated co-worker and occasional advisor. And from the technical perspective, the crew has clearly worked hard to realize the director’s vision.

It’s the vision that’s the problem. Gondry wants to weave a fable at once wry and charmingly childish yet with serious undertones, and the mixture simply never gels. “The Science of Sleep” won’t make you doze off, but when you depart the theatre, you might feel that it’s a dream not worth remembering.