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Sleep Furiously

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Sleep Furiously shows beauty of Wales

 

Sound waves: music by the Aphex Twin wreaths around the story, not filling the empty spaces but brilliantly describing them

In a week where Beyoncé Knowles makes a movie appearance as a suffering wife in a tight dress, a week when Sam Raimi’s new horror film arrives ringing with thrills and shrieks, the most interesting movie of the week by far happens to be a film that follows a mobile library from place to place in the middle of rural Wales.

And I’m not joking. Sleep Furiously may be the most beautifully elemental documentary film to have emerged in Britain in over a decade and I can’t applaud it loudly enough. Babies sleeping, clouds passing, old women watching, pigs being born — this is hardly the stuff that multiplex dreams are made of, but this is not hype, it’s life.

Actual change is hard to capture on film, mainly because few film-makers have the talent (or the funds) required for patient observation, the hallmark of the great documentary. But director Gideon Koppel does — I don’t know about the funds (the film was made on a shoestring), but he beautifully tells a real-life story about a disappearing community, the life of a people and a landscape that Dylan Thomas once sought to capture in Under Milk Wood. The farms have become mechanised, mobile phones and computers are changing the meaning of life for these people in the valley, but Koppel finds something timeless and warm in the space left behind.

The residents of Trefeurig borrow books from the library and they make cakes, they visit their friends and they talk to skilled tradesmen. At every turn there is joy and sadness, there is absurdity and gravity, the authentic ring of lives being lived no less fully for being lived fairly quietly.

Because of all the rubbish pandering for our attention — as well as our honest pandering for rubbish — we sometimes forget that this is one of the things cinema can do. It can be magical. It can make poetry. It can bring you into company with the basic things of life.

That might not seem like the exact thing you want on the high cusp of the weekend but you might be surprised to find it makes you happy.

Thrills and spills can do a lot for a person in need of some diversion but so, in a different mood, can the sight of a flock of sheep taking two full minutes to cross a hill. Before a motionless camera. In the rain. In Wales. If the movie wasn’t so beautifully made, with such a wealth of humour and humanity at its centre, I would already be laughing at my own willingness to enjoy it so much.

In one scene, four old women are looking over some photographs and you want to cheer for them. In another, a lady with a stuffed owl goes to have its perch sawn down, talking all the while like a woman who’s escaped from a great Celtic drama. Late on, when the lovely somnambulistic feel of the film has taken you in, there is a sequence where people enjoy the colours and surprises of a fireworks display, which feels more gratifying than the chariot race from Ben Hur. Music by the Aphex Twin wreaths around the story, not filling the empty spaces but brilliantly describing them, placing a halo over ordinary experience.

Maybe it’s time somebody stood up and made a compelling case for the art of the film documentary. We can no longer trust TV to look after it, because silence and strangeness don’t work on television today, even on those strands that aim to take a proper interest in Britain. Most of the things that pass under the banner of documentary are in fact cheap exploitation series about people being drunk and getting arrested, or American-style reality nonsense featuring car chases or serial killers.

But true documentary film-makers know that there is nothing so unobvious as the obvious: Britain is actually a very underdescribed country waiting for people to capture the changes and the dramas that don’t make the news.

Other countries have the same struggle to make good documentaries but occasionally they make an international hit. Patience was the instinct that created Hoop Dreams, a now classic documentary of 1994 that followed the lives of two black American teenagers as they tried to become professional basketball players. It was the instinct that drove Agnès Varda’s beautiful film The Gleaners and I, where the film-maker looks at people at they struggle for survival in the French countryside, also looking at herself as she ventures into old age.

This is the brilliant tradition that Gideon Koppel now joins with Sleep Furiously. It was to a community in the Welsh Midlands that Koppel’s parents first came as Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. At one point, we see Mrs Koppel walking to her husband’s grave and placing a stone there, a gift from the land. Nothing appears to happen, but actually everything is happening: the light, the past. These people are listeners and watchers, they tend to remember, and these are qualities that proves to be embodied in the film’s makers.

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In one stroke, Koppel reveals himself to be among the best listeners and watchers in the country, which is good news for everybody. If life is also a process of repetition — a drama of slow returning — then we might believe the beauty of his film lies in its ability to show us this truth occurring in real time.

In a splashy week for big names and exploding bodies, a peaceful and thoughtful investigation of belonging might seem a tad exotic. And it may be exotic, but it’s also miraculous.

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