The musician Beck claimed that his decision to collaborate with the director Michel Gondry (in 1997, on the music video “Deadweight”) was based on a brief taste of the French director’s work: a clever little amuse-bouche of a movie in which someone’s feet appear to follow a pair of empty shoes around the yard. Filmed in reverse and requiring nothing more than two lengths of fishing line, this charming illusion is a relatively easy one to pull off. It may be a stretch to call the clip an allegory (who’s following whom?) of the creative teamwork that has defined the 43-year-old filmmaker’s career, but it is certainly the perfect calling card for Mr. Gondry: witty, naïve, a few baby steps on the safe side of precious.

Mr. Gondry has a fecund imagination that most directors can only dream of. But the pattern of shared credits in his oeuvre — which include award-winning commercials, iconic music videos for Bjork and the White Stripes, the feel-good concert documentary “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,” and the brilliant “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which garnered an Oscar for screenwriter Charlie Kaufman — suggests he is at his best when something or someone is harnessing that imagination to another idea. It may be that all the pairings with comparatively prodigious talent have allowed Mr. Gondry to strike a balance in his work that he would struggle to achieve on his own.

“The Science of Sleep,” Mr. Gondry’s enjoyable but jejune first attempt at directing a script of his own, would seem to reinforce this theory. A colorful bricolage of surreal whimsies, it offers a wealth of inspired set pieces and a buoyant, soft-hearted sense of humor. Conceived as a bittersweet ode to the complexity of the human brain, the film ends up as a lullaby, petering out in warm folds of escapism and self-pity.

The main character, Stephane (Gael García Bernal), suffers quirkily from a set of troubling neuroses. Cast adrift by the death of his Mexican father and estranged from his French mother (whose empty second apartment in Paris he returns, early in the film, to claim), Stephane has retreated from the world into his mind, which it seems must have stopped developing sometime around his 12th birthday.

That hardly means it’s spotless. Stephane spends so much time sifting through his mental clutter on an imaginary variety show — chatting up guests, running tapes of his past, and demonstrating how to cook “memories” and “impressions” in a TV studio that exists in his head — that it’s hard for him to do much else with his life.

You can’t blame him for being bored with his job, a menial one at a small calendar-printing company. But Stephane seems more surprised than he should be to learn (via a line of work in which he’s practically required to tick off the days) that the ho-hum world of adults is full of cynicism and disappointment. He thought, naively, that he’d be designing calendars, not pasting them together; his co-workers mock his artistic ambitions. Romance is a letdown too, as his puppy love for the girl next door is hilariously savaged by a lecherous older friend (Alain Chabat) who insists the key to Stephane’s success is a maneuver called “the goat on the cliff.”

Stephane and his elfin, reclusive neighbor Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) do establish an intimate rapport of sorts, easing, despite some initial awkwardness, into the compatibility their similar names imply. Stephanie, who works in a pharmacy, shares Stephane’s 9-to-5 boredom and passion for flights of fancy, even if she stops short of his near-total embrace of the make-believe. She’s charmed by his repertoire of optical tricks and his collection of odd, fantastical toys, which includes a bicycle-helmet contraption for reading minds and a time machine that works in one-second increments.

For her part, Stephanie seems less surprised than she should be that these devices actually work: it is these brief, casual flashes of the supernatural, more than Stephane’s manic reveries or the stop-motion animation sequences running through his consciousness, that ushers the “The Science of Sleep” in the realm of the surreal. If dreams can feel like reality, the film suggests, then it’s only natural that reality should, at unexpected moments, take on qualities of a dream (at one point, Stephane’s mother’s magician-boyfriend botches an easy trick, then makes the dishes disappear with a snap of his fingers).

Film is the ideal medium for exploring these regions of perception, equipped as it is with a ready catalogue of simple, convincing sleights of hand. Early cinema embraced this sort of optical chicanery, with Mr. Gondry’s countrymen — the magician-turned-filmmaker George Méliès, René Clair, and Jean Cocteau — proving especially partial to it.

But none of them brought the miniaturist’s dedication of Mr. Gondry, which may be more handicap than gift in “The Science of Sleep.” There’s a naïve charm to the elaborate cardboard-and-papier-mâché dream sequences, but the film coddles a protagonist who not only fails to bloom into someone truly interesting, but also remains painfully immature to the end. By the time Stephane slams headfirst into Stephanie’s door, his erratic behavior has taken a childish, self-defeating turn that should by rights give poor Stephanie the spins — it’s certainly a bit much for the rest of us.