Imaginative videos for Massive Attack, White Stripes and The Chemical Brothers prove that director Michel Gondry has a gift for making the inconsequential interesting.

Either that, or he eats a lot of cheese before bedtime.

Having picked up a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, the Frenchman continues his love affair with strange love affairs in another cavalcade of wilful weirdness.

Young Mexican Stephane (Bernal) has a vivid dream life which sometimes spills over into consciousness. Everything is captured on ‘Stephane TV’, where his brain is the camera and his eyes are literally windows on the world.

In Paris to be with his mother, Stephane's mundane reality involves printing calendars in a basement office with a middle-aged berk called Guy (Chabat) and two other nerds.

Then he goes home and pretends to his neighbour Stephanie (Gainsbourg) that (a) he doesn’t live next door, and (b) he fancies her mate Zoe (Emma de Caunes, daughter of Eurotrash presenter Antoine).

Stephanie can’t tell whether Stephane is shy, weird, or simply can’t make it over the language barrier (her Spanish is worse than his French; they settle on English). None the less, she plays along with the farce.

Stephane is smitten. Tragically, Stephanie doesn’t feel the same way about him. The stuff of nightmares.

Just as Stephane’s dream-self runs around with giant foam-rubber hands in the low-budget TV style of Kenny Everett’s zany preacher Brother Lee Love, Gondry’s fantasy land is a cornucopia of hand-knitted toys, cardboard, string and cellophane.

It’s like the combined output of 1970s childrens' entertainment maestros Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate - The Clangers, Bagpuss, Ivor The Engine, et al - channelled through Blue Peter.

It could rapidly become irritating, but Gondry’s puppyish enthusiasm for his own material makes even the most impenetrable moments endearing.

Gainsbourg is also a big plus. As the film’s anchor in realism, she imbues Stephanie with a likeable integrity that contrasts nicely with Stephane’s insular oddness and unfortunate manner.

As good as Eternal Sunshine? In your dreams. But anyone in the mood for a romcom that crumples up the rulebook should keep an eye open for it.

Elliott Noble