Sleep Dealer
Directed by Alex Rivera
At Cinema Village & Empire 42nd; Runtime: 90 min.
First-time filmmaker Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer is a well-meaning failure on two accounts. As both a sci-fi and an indie drama, it strives to complicate an otherwise typical cyberpunk plot by turning William Gibson’s usual cynical slacker protagonist into a Mexican migrant worker looking to earn some scratch for his podunk family. Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) isn’t a junkie looking for a new, uniquely urban sensation but rather a wide-eyed kid from the sticks looking for a way to make good in this hostile, amorphous blob we call the world economy.
As speculative fiction rooted in the timeless fears of faceless corporations, here represented by the faceless factories workers have playfully dubbed “sleep dealers,” Sleep Dealer should have something striking to say about what the future looks like according to the third-world workers that are building it at their own expense but it has nothing memorable nor particularly coherent to offer. Rivera and co-writer David Riker’s script lacks the imaginative spark needed to bring either its generic futuristic environment or its over-serious and under-developed plot to life. Then again, even if its story were just immediately satisfying, it would still fall short of being much more than an empty-headed post-humanist melodrama.
As a variation on the typical anti-heroes in some of Gibson’s better cyberpunk stories, like Burning Chrome or The Winter Market, Memo is a curious chimera. He’s a typical country mouse unsure of how to get imprinted with the “nodes” needed to work at any “sleep dealer” and so gets propositioned by city slicker Luz Martinez (Leonor Varela). Luz looks kind but is in fact exploiting Memo to sell memories of her experiences with him over the web. This reluctantly parasitic relationship reverses the typical Gibsonian woman-as-unquantifiable-and-untapped-resource and man-as-jaded-manipulator paradigm, which I guess is somewhat novel, right?
Their bond however is based more on class distinction than sexual difference. While Luz is privileged enough to avoid the “sleep dealers,” Memo has no other viable options, making him a source of fascination for Luz. She’s attracted to his desperation and earnest need and hence volunteers to be his global voice, even though he’s also immediately her means of making money.
This is where the film’s melodramatic simplicity reveals its shortcomings as social commentary. The fact that Luz loves Memo is supposed to make up for the fact that she’s betraying him as both a person and a prole by putting words in his mouth. He doesn’t need a voice because she has the technology to capture her impressions of his melancholic determination and that’s apparently all he deserves. A demonstration of this demeaning logic comes at a more tacky than seedy bar when we see Luz’s grinning puss reflected in a mirror just beside his, as if to show that she’s imagined him into being. That image is satisfying as an act of intra-cultural ventriloquism but only for its romantic neatness.
Directed by Alex Rivera
At Cinema Village & Empire 42nd; Runtime: 90 min.
First-time filmmaker Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer is a well-meaning failure on two accounts. As both a sci-fi and an indie drama, it strives to complicate an otherwise typical cyberpunk plot by turning William Gibson’s usual cynical slacker protagonist into a Mexican migrant worker looking to earn some scratch for his podunk family. Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) isn’t a junkie looking for a new, uniquely urban sensation but rather a wide-eyed kid from the sticks looking for a way to make good in this hostile, amorphous blob we call the world economy.
As speculative fiction rooted in the timeless fears of faceless corporations, here represented by the faceless factories workers have playfully dubbed “sleep dealers,” Sleep Dealer should have something striking to say about what the future looks like according to the third-world workers that are building it at their own expense but it has nothing memorable nor particularly coherent to offer. Rivera and co-writer David Riker’s script lacks the imaginative spark needed to bring either its generic futuristic environment or its over-serious and under-developed plot to life. Then again, even if its story were just immediately satisfying, it would still fall short of being much more than an empty-headed post-humanist melodrama.
As a variation on the typical anti-heroes in some of Gibson’s better cyberpunk stories, like Burning Chrome or The Winter Market, Memo is a curious chimera. He’s a typical country mouse unsure of how to get imprinted with the “nodes” needed to work at any “sleep dealer” and so gets propositioned by city slicker Luz Martinez (Leonor Varela). Luz looks kind but is in fact exploiting Memo to sell memories of her experiences with him over the web. This reluctantly parasitic relationship reverses the typical Gibsonian woman-as-unquantifiable-and-untapped-resource and man-as-jaded-manipulator paradigm, which I guess is somewhat novel, right?
Their bond however is based more on class distinction than sexual difference. While Luz is privileged enough to avoid the “sleep dealers,” Memo has no other viable options, making him a source of fascination for Luz. She’s attracted to his desperation and earnest need and hence volunteers to be his global voice, even though he’s also immediately her means of making money.
This is where the film’s melodramatic simplicity reveals its shortcomings as social commentary. The fact that Luz loves Memo is supposed to make up for the fact that she’s betraying him as both a person and a prole by putting words in his mouth. He doesn’t need a voice because she has the technology to capture her impressions of his melancholic determination and that’s apparently all he deserves. A demonstration of this demeaning logic comes at a more tacky than seedy bar when we see Luz’s grinning puss reflected in a mirror just beside his, as if to show that she’s imagined him into being. That image is satisfying as an act of intra-cultural ventriloquism but only for its romantic neatness.
