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osprey_archerSleepwalk is the only Sara Driver movie that I managed to convince a friend to see with me (for some reason people aren’t always excited to go watch movies they’ve never heard of) and unfortunately I think it’s the weakest of the bunch - or more generously, that loosely constructed surrealist fantasy has a fairly niche appeal.
We begin seven floors up in a decaying New York City office building, an office lit by dull fluorescent lights. The boss works the front desk, answering three phones that ring in such quick succession that he never seems to take an order. A young woman collates pages from three stacks of blank paper. Steve Buscemi shifts slides restlessly around a light table.
Our heroine, Nicole, appears to be the only person actually working: she transcribes documents into a flickering early word processor. But her dull work day perks up when an interesting new job arrives: an older Chinese man arrives at the office with a young black student to act as his interpreter - but interpretation proves unnecessary. Nicole, it turns out, knows Chinese. (The evidence suggests that she’s maybe spent time in China - her son appears Chinese - but we never do find out how she became fluent. This one of the few movies I’ve seen where the heroine is a single mother.)
But back to the office. The duo want her to translate and transcribe an old manuscript of Chinese folktales - which she must never let out of her sight, they warn her, till she’s finished the job.
Naturally this seemingly simple task quickly begins to spiral out of control. The more Nicole transcribes, the more the magic of the folk tales begins to leak into the real world, so that a simple trip down the elevator turns into a nightmare as the elevator stops at each floor, and the doors open, and we see -
A little boy playing a pair of shoes, surrounded by boxes and boxes of red high heels.
The Chinese man lying in a room full of unshelled almonds.
Nothing - darkness; and the sound of footsteps approaching the elevator.
It’s all very evocative - it is, like You Are Not I, a brilliantly atmospheric movie. Unfortunately, it has two problems, the first of which is that it never quite comes together. It’s not that I want things explained - there’s no quicker way to kill a fantasy than to explain the magic too much - but that there needs to be some kind of emotional coherence or conclusion, and instead here the story just unravels.
This appears to be deliberate - the ending, in particular, seems to be deliberately ambiguous and frustrating, because the movie could have reached a perfectly reasonable conclusion in about ten seconds if it wanted to. But just because it was deliberate doesn’t mean that it’s satisfying - although who knows, maybe some people do go for it.
The other problem is that, while I’m not sure how audiences in 1986 felt about it, from the perspective of 2018 it feels very Gaze upon the Mysteries of the Exotic East, with the mysterious magical manuscript and the strange old man who is some sort of mystical sage, and also a mysterious Japanese girl with her hair in twin buns who also wants the manuscript and… eh.
We begin seven floors up in a decaying New York City office building, an office lit by dull fluorescent lights. The boss works the front desk, answering three phones that ring in such quick succession that he never seems to take an order. A young woman collates pages from three stacks of blank paper. Steve Buscemi shifts slides restlessly around a light table.
Our heroine, Nicole, appears to be the only person actually working: she transcribes documents into a flickering early word processor. But her dull work day perks up when an interesting new job arrives: an older Chinese man arrives at the office with a young black student to act as his interpreter - but interpretation proves unnecessary. Nicole, it turns out, knows Chinese. (The evidence suggests that she’s maybe spent time in China - her son appears Chinese - but we never do find out how she became fluent. This one of the few movies I’ve seen where the heroine is a single mother.)
But back to the office. The duo want her to translate and transcribe an old manuscript of Chinese folktales - which she must never let out of her sight, they warn her, till she’s finished the job.
Naturally this seemingly simple task quickly begins to spiral out of control. The more Nicole transcribes, the more the magic of the folk tales begins to leak into the real world, so that a simple trip down the elevator turns into a nightmare as the elevator stops at each floor, and the doors open, and we see -
A little boy playing a pair of shoes, surrounded by boxes and boxes of red high heels.
The Chinese man lying in a room full of unshelled almonds.
Nothing - darkness; and the sound of footsteps approaching the elevator.
It’s all very evocative - it is, like You Are Not I, a brilliantly atmospheric movie. Unfortunately, it has two problems, the first of which is that it never quite comes together. It’s not that I want things explained - there’s no quicker way to kill a fantasy than to explain the magic too much - but that there needs to be some kind of emotional coherence or conclusion, and instead here the story just unravels.
This appears to be deliberate - the ending, in particular, seems to be deliberately ambiguous and frustrating, because the movie could have reached a perfectly reasonable conclusion in about ten seconds if it wanted to. But just because it was deliberate doesn’t mean that it’s satisfying - although who knows, maybe some people do go for it.
The other problem is that, while I’m not sure how audiences in 1986 felt about it, from the perspective of 2018 it feels very Gaze upon the Mysteries of the Exotic East, with the mysterious magical manuscript and the strange old man who is some sort of mystical sage, and also a mysterious Japanese girl with her hair in twin buns who also wants the manuscript and… eh.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 02:31 am (UTC)In terms of what you're most likely to be able to get a chance to watch, her recent documentary Boom for Real about Basquiat and the New York art scene in the late 70s & early 80s is the easiest to access and also quite good.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 02:32 am (UTC)