RAMSEY'S RAMBLES
BY RAMSEY CAMPBELL
SLEEPWALKER 1984, BFI Flipside, 48m 54s, £19.99, PAL DVD-2/BD-B
I can see why Saxon Logan’s SLEEPWALKER was shelved and subsequently almost forgotten. It came just too late for its awkward length to be ac- commodated by British cinemas, which had often previously supported main features running under an hour. It may also have been too overtly political for the distributors. I don’t mean it deserves to be lost—on the contrary, its BFI release deserves to be celebrated.
The film opens with a premonitory homicidal montage that recalls both Alain Resnais (in its tem- poral disorientation) and Dario Argento. The echo of Italian horror is underlined by Phil Sawyer’s score, quite unlike the style of music common to British horror. The film also makes its symbolism overt as soon as possible; it’s set largely in a disintegrating country house called Albion (in the same establish- ing shot, we glimpse an overgrown plaque that dis- plays Dorothy Frances Gurney’s verse about the garden where one is “nearer God’s heart,” a decid- edly ironic reference here). The Britains—Alex (Bill Douglas, himself a considerable filmmaker) and Marian (Heather Page)—are the occupants, with a surname as loaded as anything of the kind in Lindsay Anderson’s BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (a per- tinent comparison, since Anderson was Logan’s cin- ematic mentor). Furthermore, it’s clear that socialist Alex’s introversion is partly to blame for the state of the house and, when a tree branch smashes a win- dow and ruins preparations for dinner, we may note the eggs in a nest on the branch. An image of the infertility of contemporary Albion? Certainly Marian’s
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wish that she’d been born in Victorian times echoes Margaret Thatcher’s aim to return the country to that era.
The dinner guests are the Paradises, cynical video entrepreneur Richard (Nickolas Grace) and li- bidinous Angela (Joanna David), and perhaps I’m making the film sound heavier and more humorless than it is. In fact, the dinner scene at the local inn is as horribly comical as anything of the kind in Mike Leigh’s work, though it’s also scattered with sug- gestive references. The only other diner (Raymond Huntley, a piece of casting that may bring Hammer Films to mind) tells of having to awaken a woman in a coma. Valdemar’s death in his sleep is invoked, and Marian asks if anyone has ever felt like they’re part of someone else’s dream. In the context of the ideological confrontations across the dinner table, these elements—especially the view of sleep as a form of unawareness—take on a decidedly political significance. It’s an approach that risks seeming
too explicit, but—again, like similar strategies in BRITANNIA HOSPITAL—it works, certainly for this viewer. The restaurant scene introduces the theme of repression, and Marian describes a text Alex had apparently translated, in which a woman dreams of peeling tomatoes only to waken and find she’s a murderer. Isn’t this related to Richard’s dismissal of Alex as a carnivore who ignores the blood? Of course, dreams are where repressed material can find expression—but, in waking dreams, that’s dangerous. We may also wonder in what kind of hospital (never specified) Angela met Marion.
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