Originally posted on Row Three on 12 March, 2009

[xrr rating=3/5]

Near the beginning of indie noir homage The Perfect Sleep, the nameless Narrator drives off after having brutally killed an enemy and his voiceover warns us: “Some of you clever types might think this was one of those stories where everything kinda makes sense in the end. Wrong.” When I first heard that line, I thrilled a little inside, because there should always be some level of non-sense-making in a noir film, especially one that sets itself up as a cross between the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and the moody thoughtfulness of Fyodor Dostoevsky. And especially one whose director, Jeremy Alter (directing his first feature), co-produced David Lynch’s Inland Empire, one of the most deliriously amazing pseudo-incomprensible films of all time. But when the narrator speaks these words, what he really means is that very little is going to make any sense, ever – and that’s not necessarily as good a thing as I was hoping. On the good side, what the film lacks in narrative flow it very nearly makes up for in visual panache.

In The Perfect Sleep’s self-contained nowhere-world, the Narrator (played by Anton Pardoe, who also wrote the film) returns to his dysfunctional thug-ridden family after a ten-year absence to settle an old score and protect his long-time love Porphyria (Without a Trace’s Roselyn Sanchez, who is undeniably gorgeous but whose acting here is a bit telenovela-ish). She’s threatened by her uncle Nicolai and his henchman the Rajah – they all bear grudges against each other for various betrayals and killings that the Narrator explains to us in a breathless flashback. After watching the film twice, I think I can lay out the whole plot, but even so, I’m muddled on a few points. Knowing Alter’s connection with Lynch, I’m sure that the muddled, unclear plot is purposeful, but in contrast to Lynch’s intriguing incomprehensibility that leads the viewer to tease out thematic and spatial unity, The Perfect Sleep is mostly frustrating and self-contradictory, especially when it comes to character motivations. It’s relatively clear why the Narrator does most of the things he does, but the one pulling all the strings is Nicolai, who may or may not be the Narrator’s father. And I was never quite sure what Nicolai’s endgame was – everything I came up with as a potential purpose for his actions could have been accomplished with far less effort and far less convoluted plotting. The filmmakers are trying to be clever with the way they use flashbacks to conceal and reveal information, but it’s not wholly successful – in fact, the flashback device manages to make the film both overly expository and overly confusing.

Yet there’s still a lot to enjoy about the film, especially its arresting visual style and in-joke references to classic noir and literature. Whether you think the plotting is clever or muddled, you can’t deny that Alter has a great eye for camera setups, blocking, and lighting. There are so many screencappable shots, it’s almost ridiculous. And the fact that the film knows that it’s using a very specific visual language delighted me, though some may find it a bit ingratiating. At one point, the Narrator stands facing away from us in a full shot, striking a laconic pose in a high-contrast, beautifully-framed shot and says in voice-over, “You probably think this is one of those stories, a study of the shadows. Dark and dirty and utterly immoral. Say, nice shot. So it seems kind of cliche, but the French dig this kind of visual. And I dig the French.” That sort of reference to the 1950s French film critics that basically created the category of “film noir” is exactly what cinephiles eat up – but it may be too overt for its own good.

Similarly, there are a lot of individual scenes that I loved – the first time we see the Narrator off someone, for example, is very darkly humorous, with a perfect “oops” from the Narrator as he holds up the cartridge from the handgun he left within the downed man’s reach. In another bit, the beat-up Narrator is asked if he’s able to walk, and he responds with a cocky “sure,” takes a few steps, and collapses. The comic timing in these scenes is gold, and helps offset the overwroughtness of the rest of the plot. The music (by David Vanian of the The Damned) also provides a good counterpoint to the visuals, alternating between moody and incongruously jazzy; a perfect incongruity, I mean. I really loved a few of the fight scenes as well, which combined crime movie brutality with martial arts agility to good effect.

As a former literature student, I enjoyed the literary references that Pardoe threw in constantly, as well. The Narrator’s mentors growing up are named Gogozhin and Ganya, two characters in Dostoevksy’s The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamozov gets a mention as well. The Narrator’s murderous doctor friend (who is amorally awesome in his brief sequence) quotes Hamlet, and Nicolai himself is obsessed with Othello. The name Porphyria refers to Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover,” and, not to leave the noir roots too far behind, one character recounts a side story originally told in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. There are more, and I’m sure I didn’t catch them all. What I’m not sure about is whether these references have any deeper meaning. As far as I can tell, they’re references without content, either an attempt to tie the film to greater literary predecessors through mere quotation, or a perfect example of postmodern pastiche, which Frederic Jameson defines as imitation of an original without the weight or context of the original (my loose paraphrase). I hope it’s the second one, because that’s more interesting, and I don’t agree with Jameson’s dismissal of pastiche as a legitimate practice.

And that gets at my real dilemma with The Perfect Sleep. As an homage/pastiche of film noir I find it very interesting, especially since it’s clever enough to include noir’s literary heritage as well as its cinematic forerunners. As an example of striking visual style and interesting musical scoring, I enjoyed looking and listening to it (and I certainly look forward to seeing what Alter comes up with next). But as a self-contained narrative, it just doesn’t add up its pleasing moments and elements into a convincing whole. Still, those first two things do carry an awful lot of weight with me, and the further away I get from watching it, the more I’m thinking of things I liked about it.

The Perfect Sleep opens in Los Angeles tomorrow (3/13/09) for a limited engagement at Laemmle’s Sunset Cinema, and will play a limited engagement in Quad Theatres in New York starting on 3/27/09.