Review: Sleep Furiously (Gideon Koppel, 2008)
A Beautiful, Lyrical Documentary Portrait of Life in a Welsh Village
Jul 13, 2009
A beautiful, gentle portrait of life in and around the rural Welsh village of his childhood, Gideon Koppel's Sleep Furiously has been quietly doing the rounds since its premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival a year ago, and finally received a proper (if limited) release in the United Kingdom earlier this year, courtesy of New Wave Films.
There aren't really any superlatives that can truly do justice to Koppel's masterful handling of this material. It's measured without seeming forced, funny without being patronising, polished without over-calculation, sprawling without losing focus, and sparse without being dull. It has a lightness of touch that allows village life to gently unfurl, whilst seeming to understand all too well that the only constants here are the wind that blows up the gullies and the rain that falls from the sky.
Fleeting Filmic References
As is often the case with films as open as Sleep Furiously, all manner of fleeting filmic references spring to mind. A long line of sheep crossing a wet hillside seem to echo the opening scenes of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God, while some of the dialogue recalls the loosely scripted central conversations in the films of Ken Loach. There are also shades of Tony Hill's magnificent short Downside Up, in which a looping camera takes the viewer on a dizzyingly surreal journey through a series of (mostly) rural British landscapes.
In many ways, Sleep Furiously also provides a modern counterpoint to the vibrant rural communities presented by the British Documentary Movement in the 1930s and '40s, communities that have now aged for the worse and face a seemingly terminal struggle against urban lifestyle, consistently undermined by the removal of bus services and the closure of shops and schools.
Reflections in Contemporary Documentary Cinema
As a contemporary portrait of Koppel's teenage home in which all romantic notions of the past are set aside in narration-less deference to the here and now, Sleep Furiously also exists as something of a unwilling companion piece to Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, in which romanticized notions of a long forgotten Liverpool are reconstructed via archival footage and Davies' own lilting first-person narration.
From another perspective, Sleep Furiously is not a million miles from the somewhat romantic approach of French documentarians Nicolas Philibert (Être et avoir) and Raymond Depardon (La vie moderne / Modern Life), but what sets Koppel apart here is the artfulness of his approach. He shuns cohesive linear structures and dramatic narrative arcs and allows the waxing and waning of the seasons and the dogged continuation of everyday life in the village dictate the course of his film.
The film's one minor fault is the heavy-handed presentation of Guy Fawkes Night, during which Koppel's more contemporary approach to camerawork and editing sinks into sub-music video territory and very nearly ruins the quiet, unassuming charm of an otherwise brilliant, sublime and faultless film.
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