Sleepless (Italy. 2001)

Sleepless is director’s Dario Argento’s desperate attempt to emulate the success of his golden age giallos (Murder mysteries with heavy slasher elements) of the days gone of youre. The man has a slew of classic genre films under his belt with such stand-outs as “The Birds with the Crystal Plumage” and “Deep Red” but by this point he hadn't had a hit for years. Most fans had accepted that Argento had completely lost it after his soft edged adaption of “Phantom of the Opera” and Argento was desperate to prove himself. He promised his next picture would be “Going back to the bloody days!” but most where sceptical to say the least. The oeuvre of Argento has always been a mix of intoxicating visuals wedged between nonsensical plotlines and characters. The director is completely uninterested in engaging the viewer at a narrative level. He’s much more interested at jarring them out of their cinematic stupor with little bursts of camera acrobatics and realistically impossible but mesmerizing compositions. His masterpiece is without a doubt the fever dream that is Suspiria, but that only worked because the entire inner universe of that film was unreal. The film never attempted to relate itself to the world as we know it. His giallo’s have a more difficult time because they set their sandbox up in the modern world and when shit hits the fans it’s laughable when held up against our day to day lives. If a whole film is made up of garish primal colors then we accept it as normal. If there’s garish colors every twenty minutes it sticks out like a sore thumb. Would Argento be able to hit the balance he did over twenty years ago once again after so many duds?

Max Von Sydow must have hit hard times to star in this film and that’s actually a good thing. He brings an A Game to the forefront and his presence is physically missed every time we’re forced to endure the loose lips of dubbed Italian Actors going through the motions. The plot surprisingly resembles his first three straight giallo films instead of his more experimental later work. The whole mystery revolves around a Nursery Rhyme that actually makes logical sense in the narrative. The editing, sadly, hasn’t improved from his last few works. Characters drop in and out without rhyme or reason and only slowly start to form their solid place by mid-way. It’s confusing for absolutely no reason. That could have been the intention from the start, but it just comes off as lazy. The pacing suffers from the usual problems and we’re stuck with a slight case of “Go – Stop – Stop –Stop – Go – Go – Stop- editing scheme. The murders themselves are literally cliff note versions of Argento’s past work: P.O.V shots, black gloves, lengthy demises and a GOBLIN backing it all up with an evocative (yet slightly out of place) metal-ish score. If it weren’t for the canned sound effects straight off a 5$ CD I’d even rate some of them as career best. The man doesn’t let us down when it comes to directorial flourishes either, with a breath-taking Opera set tracking shot being the films stand out set piece.

All we can do is hope that Argento (at this point of his career) hits on HIS cylinder when he makes a film, which has its own internal set of rules. Come for the eye candy and fast forward through everything else. Sleepless is perfect for people who want a taste of Argento’s work but are put off with the less technically adept flights of fancy of his earlier films. This is no “Bird with a Crystal Plumage” but we’ll never get that again, so we might as well enjoy this while it lasts.