To Sleep So As To Dream (1986): silent Japanese dream detectives! (Review)

The fictional detective is a rational creature. As soon as detective stories were invented, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle were using their sleuths to reveal the mundane truth behind apparently supernatural events; the latter’s maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains – however improbable – must be the truth remains a guiding light for the whole genre. To a certain kind of writer, this is an invitation to subversion. Films like God Told Me To and Cast a Deadly Spell have set the classic detective down in a world of occult horror, while Blade Runner placed him in an existential science-fiction mystery. Literary mutations of the form by postmodern writers like Flann O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon and Jorge Luis Borges have wandered even further from the familiar path, and this is where To Sleep So As To Dream positions itself. The first film by Kaizo Hayashi, it’s released on a typically cared-for Blu-Ray by Arrow Video.

Arrow’s back-cover blurb mentions Hayashi’s later films Circus Boys and Zipang, but a better comparison might be his 1994 work The Most Terrible Time in My Life. That introduced the character of detective Maiku Hama, who reappeared in some of Hayashi’s other films as well as a spin-off television series. Hama’s name is a playful translation of Mike Hammer, the classic hard-boiled ‘tec created by Mickey Spillane who was memorably subverted by director Robert Aldrich in Kiss Me Deadly. That tells you a fair bit about Hayashi’s attitude towards crime fiction: enough literacy and respect for the form to go for a precision reference, but enough imagination and mischief to rip up the rule-book. Aldrich portrayed Hammer as hopelessly outclassed by the weirdness and violence of contemporary America; Shiro Sano’s detective Uotsuka in To Sleep So As To Dream is troubled by a mystery from the distant past, revolving around a silent movie.

To Sleep So As To Dream is styled like a 1950s noir of the kind Japan produced a lot of in the aftermath of World War II. But it takes its cues from the (expertly realised) film-within-a-film in another way: namely, the majority of the film takes place without dialogue. At first, you assume Hayashi is pastiching silent cinema, but the actual joke is weirder and more involved than this: the characters are voiceless. The fight scenes feature plenty of foleyed slaps and smacks, but no cries of pain; the only voices we hear are the ones played on a cassette recorder, or some similar device, because they’re technically sound effects. It is such a strange conceptual gag, worked out with remarkable thoroughness.

It’s the kind of thing that can get a film dismissed as “clever-clever” in some quarters, and while I won’t lower myself to that description I’m still not sure if To Sleep So As To Dream really adds up to much beyond showing off Hayashi’s smarts, skill and wit. To go back to the examples mentioned above, Borges and Pynchon used this kind of deconstructed detective narrative to comment on politics, time, perception and humanity, but it can be hard to see the deeper currents of Hayashi’s film beneath its impressive surfaces. The film’s main problem is that it’s a very ambitious thing to attempt with your debut – but that’s also the film’s major asset. It’s never dull, it looks fantastic, and even if I don’t discover any hidden depths on repeat viewings it contains a perfect visual metaphor for all this narrative dazzle: a simple magic trick where the audience is invited to guess which one of three cups has an egg underneath it, and of course none of them do.

Extras include two commentaries, one with Sano and Hayashi, one with Japanese cinema scholars Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp. You expect those commentaries to come at the film from different angles, and they do: Mes and Sharp put the film in its historical context, Sano and Hayashi reveal how they recreated silent ninja films on a tiny budget. Both of them, though, seem utterly charmed by the picture in front of them, full of affectionate laughter at the film’s audacity and originality. There are some tantalising clips from real, partly-lost Japanese silent films to judge Hayashi’s recreation next to, an interview with Sano, and two delightful features about Midori Sawato, a real-life benshi or silent film narrator. This practice, central to Hayashi’s film, is one I hadn’t heard of before – the nearest thing I’d seen previously was the Ugandan “video jockeys” celebrated in Nabwana I.G.G.’s low-budget action movies. Like the VJs, the benshi are a very culturally specific phenomenon that also channel something close to a universal joy of cinema. They make you want to go out to the pictures again, even if this disc is enough to make you stay indoors a bit longer.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – TO SLEEP SO AS TO DREAM (1986)