Most Valuable Platypus

Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)

The mood from Duelle. A story from a napkin that Pynchon threw out when he was making notes for Lot 49. A lead actress with the most expressive nose this side of Laura Dern. Sara Driver gets at an image in the most complicated manner she can, usually finding about 18 different shadows and then circling them with a few more distractions – even when things seem like they’re moving toward a point of coherence it’s a movie at odds with itself. What sets her apart from Rivette and Pynchon: where their disintegrations lead to new narratives – Gravity’s Rainbow falls apart and still has 200 pages to go, Out 1 sustains itself hours after it’s irrelevant whether or not there was ever even the idea for a conspiracy – Sleepwalk ends after just 75 minutes with the movie expelling some characters and others deciding they don’t much feel liking being in a movie anymore.  Suzanne Fletcher lying down to sleep, adrift and with her son still missing, is one of the great acts of resistance in the history of cinema:  this situation is shit and I won’t stand for it, so take your movie and shove it. If only we were all that brave in the face of injustice.