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Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)
🕑 Added 2021-05-01 06:07:24 +0000 UTC
I did not care for this movie. But it has undeniable significance as an artifact.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I just don't think this 1980s NYC downtown filmmaking has aged very well. After sampling Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup and lasting about 15 minutes, I turned to Driver's debut film, and there are certainly things about it to recommend. Like all No Wave entries, Sleepwalk is a partly accidental, partly intentional snapshot of a city in transition. Giuliani's big gentrification push hadn't begun, of course. But most artists understood that they'd been maneuvered into rundown neighborhoods as a way to displace poor minority communities, and to do so with a modicum of liberal cover. And at least some of these artists knew that they'd be ushered out of downtown with the next big push.
Sleepwalk often looks like another planet, not just because it depicts a a filth that is long gone but also because Driver and cinematographer Jim Jarmusch obviously sought out the scummiest locales they could find. Nikki (Suzanne Fletcher) works at some kind of low-rent industrial photo and copy business. This ostensibly realistic office space resembles the dilapidated workplace of Joe Versus the Volcano or Bartleby; the building itself is a kind of multi-level horror show. These purely visual ideas are perhaps where Sleepwalk excels, but they also partake of the Akermanesque desolation that defines an era in American urbanism.
Alas, Sleepwalk is also hobbled by the kind of dated-hipster touches that are clearly part of a private language, the sorts of things that a demimonde finds hilarious but others of us don't much appreciate. The crux of the plot involves Nikki's assignment to translate a Chinese document of some apparent spiritual import. This leads to a lot of Orientalism that's clearly supposed to be ironic, but really plays no differently than Quentin Tarantino's inverted-commas racism. A Chinese guru (Stephen Chen) lives in an empty flat filled with spilled almonds. A young Japanese woman called Ecco Ecco (Ako) is strangled with her own hair. In short, Asian people and texts exist in Sleepwalk to suggest the strange and inscrutable.
Then of course there's Ann Magnuson delivering a singularly grating performance with a thick but unspecific European accent. All in all, Driver's film depicts a faux New York that treats urban cosmopolitanism like a quirky gimmick. Although this rankles in terms of the politics of representation, that's not really the problem here. This film just thinks it's a lot cleverer and more bizarre than it actually is. Of course, this was also true of the visual art that came from this scene, all that Keith Haring / Kenny Scharf elevated-graffiti business. The impulse toward funky populism often lead to work that simply tried too hard to mire itself in pop gestures and received ideas, all saturated with an "ironic sincerity." Those who avoided this semiotic double-bind and just produced direct statements of artistic intent -- Jarmusch and Basquiat, really -- ended up making work that was built to last.
