Association
for the Study of Dreams Newsletter Review
by Kelly Bulkeley, January 1996
(reprinted with the permission of the author)
German director Wim Wenders
made this between his two popular angel films, Wi
ngs
of Desire and Far Away, So Close. Despite William Hurt heading an all-star
cast and the predominance of English (minor characters speak subtitled Russian,
Japanese, and Aboriginal Australian), this film never sawcommercial release
and is playing only at campuses and art houses. Set in 1999, Hurt's character
is on the run from the CIA and assorted other militaristic nasties, with a
device invented by his scientist father(Max von Sydow) which records mental
experiences onto videotape. He first applies this to such simple tasks as
feeding signals back into another person's brain so that the blind experience
what someone else has already visually processed for them. Eventually he ends
up in Australia, where the Aborigines whom his anthropologist mother (Jean
Morreau) has befriended are hiding her and his father in secret caves lined
in breathtaking images of Dreamtime. There they decide that recording nocturnal
dreams is the ultimate application for their device.Interestingly, Wenders
does not dwell long on the ability of one person to watch another person's
dream as does every other science fiction film positing such an invention
(See Dreamscape, Dream Lover, & The Clocks Were Striking 13, reviewed in previous
issues). Instead, he quickly switches to the equally interesting corollary
that each person will now have access to all of their own dream content in
complete detail as never before. However, at this point he must have consulted
Francis Crick and Graham Mitchison for dream theory, for events begin to tell
us that paying a lot of attention to recalling your dreams is bad for you,
unnatural; it sinisterly undermines the waking life of the experimenters.
Fortunately the aborigine experts on dreamtime have a antidote for this, but
I won't tell you the whole plot. This is actually a wonderful film if you
forgive some obtuseness about dreams. The visual elements are gorgeous, not
only the dream sequences, but also panoramic travel scenes. Hurt flees through
some of most spectacular scenery of rural Asian and Australian as well as
through Wender's wild futuristic versions of Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo
(where hotels now rent ultra elegant coffin-size sleeping berths). His 1999
versions of evening-wear, MTV, street crime, and automatic teller machines
are demonically clever. One mercenary tracks Hurt with a malfunctioning Russian-manufactured
computer program,"Bounty Bear"--this bizarre hybrid of advanced artificial
intelligence and children's games graphics could stand alone as a satiric
cartoon. The film is long (168 min)and slow-moving toward the end. It would
benefit from some editing, but it is an ingenious, lyrical fantasy which I
would encourage ASDer's to catch if you get the chance.
