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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SLEEP FURIOUSLY It can confidently be said that Gideon Koppel’s ambitious documentary, Sleep Furiously, is both fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. The film can readily be compared to cinema vérité classics of the 1970s, like the labor strike reportage in Harlan County, U.S.A., or the PBS television masterwork An American Family, in which the camera plants you (albeit over many lengthy episodes) smack in the middle of a family falling apart at the seams. Although structurally, Sleep Furiously scarcely resembles any of these films. Koppel’s lyrical and evocative paean to his birthplace, the Welsh hillside farming village of Trefeurig, where his immigrant parents found refuge after escaping the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II Europe, strives to be an entirely different type of documentary altogether. But, like the earlier works mentioned above, Sleep Furiously deposits you in a place that becomes the film’s main “character.” Koppel’s film trades talking-head clichés and endless voiceovers for sweeping vistas of the breathtakingly stark landscapes and slice-of-life takes within this highly traditional and close-knit community. He finds poetry in the simplicity of sheepherders tending their flocks, cows giving birth, villagers shooting off night fireworks for some festival or other, and even the old-fashioned but vital public library van making its rounds in the village, delivering books to eager, but mostly senior, citizens, who, of course, represent the traditional old guard of agrarian Welsh society. Trefeurig is also a community very much in transition between the old ways and encroaching 21st century technology and flux. There are some subtle signs of political conflict and activism, although the filmmakers soft-pedal this message and mainly opt to let the sheer natural beauty of the land, and its hardworking and unassuming people, speak for itself. The film sets up its own unique rhythm, and, once established, does not deviate from it, allowing something hypnotic to develop. With the classical and masterfully austere yet evocative ambient/electro soundtrack by Aphex Twin, Sleep Furiously ends up as a sumptuous audio-visual tone-poem that approaches the stark heights of an Edward Hopper painting or a Richard Avedon photograph, but therein also encompass its limitations. Because Koppel’s film concentrates on the visual beauty and pastoral rhythms of hillside village farming life, human beings only occasionally take center stage. Sleep Furiously never really brings the viewer into solid interaction with Trefeurig’s denizens or delves into its social underpinnings, history, or deeper traditions beyond what Koppel’s camera, otherwise, fascinatingly and (mainly) mesmerizingly portrays. One woman’s connection with her deceased but now taxidermically-preserved pet owl is touching, but sets up many more questions about these people and their traditions than it ever answers. If one expects a documentary that explains all, Sleep Furiously will only disappoint, but if one is looking for an evocation of a sadly, and rapidly, eroding community that is steeped in long tradition and the sheer physical majesty of its often brutally humbling landscape, the film will remain at least somewhat satisfying, though it refuses to conform to any conventional documentary structure or to provide much sustenance beyond the sheer sensual experience of the trip. This
excursion, however, is generally so rich that one can then almost
forgive Koppel’s film for not necessarily taking us all the way there or
failing to impart any lasting sense that we truly know these
people and know this village inside and out. In the end, it comes
quite close in giving the viewer a solid sensory immersion in its
milieu.
Scott David Briggs
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