Sleeper (1973)

(YouTube Streaming, December 2022) I didn’t have many movies left to watch from Woody Allen’s “earlier, funnier” period, so it was with some mournfulness that I went through Sleeper—a science fiction comedy in which Allen’s usual nebbish alter ego wakes up hundreds of years in the future, ready to take satirical potshots at 1973 American culture through science-fictional devices. Much of it works well, although you may want to have Wikipedia at the ready to catch some of the more pointed references. (Other references I recognized without help—I was very amused, for instance, that the Playboy centrefold joke ended up referring to none other than Lena of old-school Computer Science Imaging Research fame.) Allen’s comic style here is polished and efficient—the mumbling, the self-deprecation, the unlikeliness of this wholly unremarkable person being an ambassador to the future is given proper comic attention, and acts as a macho foil to an even more innocuous future than the role he plays. (Indeed, at times I was struck at how Sleeper, coming from an outspoken left-wing creator, would now be seen as skirting the outer edges of a right-wing comedy about a degenerate future. But let’s not go there.)  Don’t expect a tightly plotted story or a coherent future: At 87 minutes, Sleeper is a collection of jokes loosely strung together by a chaotic production aesthetic—a bit like Bananas. Interestingly, Allen does far more purely physical comedy here, especially in sequences where he impersonates a silvery robot butler. Sleeper is, perhaps more than anything else, a refreshing film—naïve but determined in its drive to get laughs every half-minute or so. It’s enough to make you pine for more of those “earlier, funnier” Allen movies.