Sleep Furiously (6/10)

December 5th, 2011

Once you reach a certain age you begin to reminisce about the good old days and how life was so much better way back when. In some communities – not mine, but in some – they are still the good old days, and so it’s perhaps even more heartbreaking to see them go. Trefeurig is a little village just east of Aberystwyth in mid-Wales, and it is crumbling. Filmmaker Gideon Koppel, who has a vested interest in the town, filmed for a year and Sleep Furiously is what he found.

At first glance, this film doesn’t seem like much at all. Not a great deal happens, but then, not a great deal happens in Trefeurig. A school receiving a five-hundred pound donation is good enough to get the press out for a photo shoot; an owl is in need of a bit of taxidermy (‘put it in the freezer and when it’s good and cold pop it in the post to me’); a cow’s giving birth. Headline stuff.

Gradually, you realise that this community is in danger of dying out. There are kids around, it’s true, but the village school is under threat of closure. The villagers gather for a meeting to discuss this closure: four people attend. Does this mean they’ve given up hope, too? If they have, then Koppel’s magnificently filmed documentary is a sharp dig to the ribs, an underlined reminder of what they’re at risk of losing.

I make this seem terribly important – and it is – but you wouldn’t guess it from the laconic, laid-back nature of this little village’s inhabitants. The blue-rinse brigade sit around over pots of tea and pore over old photographs and reminiscences of their younger years. The Welsh accent is easy on the ear to me, living as I do so close to it, and hearing these old biddies talking is a delight. They seem oblivious to the camera mounted in the corner of their parlour recording their every conversation, and that speaks oodles about Koppel’s standing amongst them. A little grave, visited once during the documentary, indicates why.

There’s an American equivalent of Sleep Furiously that you might of heard of. Sweetgrass came out a year or so ago (after this movie, which was released in 2009) and it detailed sheep, lots of sheep, and their annual drive across Montana. It was an elegiac piece, one that I couldn’t quite love, but could admire for its gorgeous cinematography and tip of the hat to old-timey life. Sleep Furiously is every bit its equal. Koppel has an amazing eye for a shot, and a skilled man’s luck for getting the right things to happen at the right time. Blu-Ray has been the preserve of the sci-fi blockbuster, but if ever a film needed to be seen at the very best resolution it’s this one. I had the same reservations with Koppel’s movie as I had with Sweetgrass, inasmuch as it had a propensity for making my mind wander off for stretches, but the mid-Welsh locale is so much closer to home for me that I forgave the occasional almost lifeless patch.

A sweet, gentle film about a way of life rapidly crumbling, here is a movie that could be a time capsule of any date since who knows when. Replace the tractors with ploughs, the travelling librarian for a town crier (there’s one of those, too, here) and you could be back in Dickensian times. If you require a change of pace from your normal movie fare, this is the film for you.