Requiem for Another Dreamer

"The Wrestler," out on DVD today, comes to save American cinema.

It’s hard to say, on the other hand, exactly what Vadim Glowna’s “House of the Sleeping Beauties” (2006) is — semi-Surrealist fantasy, male-menopausal wet dream, woozy Freudian smoosh of sexual doubt and death fear? All of them, probably, but it’s not complex: a desolate widower (Glowna) is advised by his crotchety friend (Maximilian Schell) to visit a secret quasi-brothel, where a man can go and lay down beside a young, naked sleeping woman, and also surrender to unconsciousness. The madame of the establishment (“The Tin Drum”’s Angela Winkler) warns against abusing the girls, but assures her clients that the drugged dreamers cannot wake up and will have no memory of the night. So, Glowna’s charmless schlub becomes a regular patron, pinching nipples, wondering what would happen if he impregnated one of the sleepers and talking aloud about his own, largely spent, life.

Based on a story by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, the film effortlessly triangulates ideas of sleep, sex and death in virtually every image — without consciousness, a gorgeously naked girl is closer to a suggestion of mortality than of sexual release, as the protagonist discovers, just as flawless physical beauty is an insistent reminder of how much youth he no longer possesses. Of course, this absurd movie objectifies its women to an outrageous degree — or is their nighttime objectification for Glowna in implicit contrast to the daytime lives we never see but know are there? But it’s also a Buñuelian sketch of a swoony old man cornered by his inability to fuck — and we by our inability to observe it. Unfortunately, Glowna demonstrates no Buñuelian wit, and the ending is a crashing and small-minded pretension. Before that, there’s a Rorschach-ness at work, and the skin is lovely.

“The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight) and “House of the Sleeping Beauties” (First Run Features) are now available on DVD.

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