The sleeper

The Sleeper (Sleeper in English) is a 1973 American film. It is the comedy &# 34;early" by Woody Allen. Constructed as a satire of films and futuristic ideals, the New York filmmaker evokes metallic environments and absurd situations, making a physical comedy (or slapstick) with a jazzy soundtrack composed by Allen himself and his group jazz band The New Orleans Funeral Ragtime Orchestra.

Although the influence of George Orwell's 1984 is evident throughout the film, it is initially based on the H. G. Wells novel When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) (later revised as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910).

Plot

Miles Monroe (Allen) owns a "health food" establishment. After attending a tonsil removal operation, he is mistakenly frozen, being awakened 200 years later, in the future, by a group of rebels who need a person without identity to carry out their plans to overthrow the dictator who rules the world.

Initially Monroe resists and tries to escape, posing as a mechanical butler. His encounter with a woman, Luna (Diane Keaton), and a series of misadventures and chases end up causing him to be captured and assimilated into the system the rebels sought to destroy.

After being kidnapped again by them and subjected to a re-education process, Monroe agrees to participate in the conspiracy: his first mission will be to find out about the ultra-secret AIRES project, which happily ends up being offered to him as an opportunity to achieve his goals.

Comments

Woody Allen's humor is shown in all its splendor, leaving behind the structure of "sketch" from his previous film, Everything He Wanted to Know About Sex (1972). The satires are hilarious, like the fact that the totalitarian governor is attacked and only his nose survives: the nose continues to rule, while scientists try to extract cells from his tissue and clone the ruler.

In another scene, Miles discovers that the vast majority of people are frigid, except for a few who are of Latino descent, which he attributes to something in the air over the Caribbean Sea, and that sex requires a partner to have sex. enter a device called the "orgasmatron". Only in this way can one feel pleasure: through machines, through the artificial.

Initially the film was planned to have a duration of 4 hours, in two halves. The first would be the life of Miles Monroe in the present (1973) and the other half in the future (year 2173), the two parts would be presented in the same function with an intermission.

The Sleepyhead is a classic comedy by Woody Allen, in which he equally pays homage to the Volkswagen Sedan, parodies A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee's best-known play Williams) and science fiction movies and incidentally makes a political commentary, all with the comic resources of his great idols: Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin. There is also an implicit reference to the story The Nose by Nikolai Gogol. Someone once defined The Sleepyhead as "the Woodyallenian version of 1984 by George Orwell".