Certain films deal in exposition and it’s their downfall – offering quick sketches of characters with whom we’re supposed to connect. Other films make heavy use of back-story while still managing to put forth fully graspable personalities. Christopher Munch’s Sleepy Time Gal falls somewhere in the middle. The film introduces a woman whose ideals of charity work, obscure culture, and “big city” frankness seem the perfect way to take the focus off herself and her suppressed anger – allowing her to live in a justified world of bitterness, self pity, and blindness to her shortcomings.
Unlike Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful, where the lack of character exploration lessens its resonance, Sleepy Time Gal understands that it’s okay to include exposition when the focus of the film is a survey of one’s state of mind – the muses of Frances (Jacqueline Bisset), a dying cancer patient. She’s trying to identify with her past while appreciating the present – weighing her regrets in balance against her fulfillments. We learn that her major repentance is the nullity of her family. Quite a vagabond, Frances had neither the time nor the ideals for conventional family life. Having two sons with two separate men has yielded an estranged relationship with both, though she’s closer to Morgan, (her youngest, played well by Nick Stahl, one of the more subtly emotive and talented young actors). Her daughter, however, is the innermost part of her deep regret, as she lost the girl to an impetuous decision to give her up for adoption.
The film’s first half is amazing, weaving visual motifs with an evocative soundtrack, to underscore confrontational performances and to help add flesh to the shadows of the narrative. Shadows are important here, as they define ambiguity and illusion. For example, the shadow of a tiny tree branch can become a mighty sword. It’s the ambiguity and the illusion of the characters assembled here that find further definition through this exquisite visual motif. The film’s aesthetics are a meld of Woody Allen’s dank romanticism and character psychology, with Douglas Sirk’s moody, expressionistic tones that become characters all themselves.
Munch ingeniously increases the pace of otherwise still scenes with the use of same-scene dissolves. He goads his audience by juxtaposing static, stifling takes with the excitement of quick, liberating tracking shots.
These elements combine to become the strength and evocation of the multidimensional, complex world being depicted here. The soundtrack’s melancholy fuses with joyous melodies, reverberating from scene to scene, as the characters’ emotions come through with each note.
Munch eternalizes the internal in a special way. Unfortunately, though, this gives way to fragmentation by the closing act. Where a beautiful mood piece cultivates throughout the first two-thirds of the film by speaking to us in expressionistic terms, the third part exudes a vagueness for which the expressionistic language cannot compensate. There are too many short-term flashbacks and too many scenes that show a character that you now have questions about, where earlier in the film “things” were understood.
To the film’s credit, the acting is fresh and unselfconscious, and Munch is a marvel of reality versus sappy sentiment. The premise of Frances on her deathbed could be a set-up for weepy manipulation. Instead it’s an even-handed scene in which she lets her son know she would have preferred him growing up in the city rather than the suburbs.
The film’s overall message of ‘live your life to the fullest’ is sufficiently implicit to avoid being heavy-handed. The end result, however, is still a film too fragmented to be considered complete in all it wants to say, but it delivers a message nonetheless.
