Light Sleeper
A film by Paul Schrader
Reviewed by Mario Giorgetti
A student of French film-maker Robert Bresson's work, whose favourite subject was the lone outsider, US writer-director Paul Schrader develops and redefines in Light Sleeper themes already successfully explored in his previous films (American Gigolo, Hardcore) and his screenplays for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Says Schrader, "I like to take those people society disapproves of and make them into — not heroes exactly — but protagonists".
Actor Willem Dafoe is John LeTour, a fortyish ex-junkie in New York who, when he is not sitting in his room writing journal entries, is on the street delivering drugs to select clients for a boutique wholesaler named Ann (Susan Sarandon).
LeTour is a light sleeper; he tosses and turns in his bed, wrestling with his loneliness and the boredom of a decadent existence. He is caught in a life of easy bucks without much responsibility or even real danger.
But the good old days of recreational drugs are over; the brutal new scene is increasingly dominated by crack and hard drugs. A new and insidious era is displacing the old, leaving no room for old-fashioned, civilised conventions.
LeTour can't move with the times. He is no sleazy back-street hustler. He is handsome, speaks low and dresses with understated elegance — he has a likeable if depraved style. Cruising Manhattan in a chauffeur-driven sedan, he delivers, takes the money and leaves, mild-mannered, almost invisible in his unobtrusiveness. Looking at the wasted back-stretch of his life with "euphoric recall" — a kind of selective memory that suppresses the lows and enhances the highs — he is slow to accept the new realities that are crowding around him.
But reality has a way of intruding into the most charmed illusions. A murder in the park and a chance encounter with the love of his life throw his comfortable existence on the margins into disarray and place him in mortal danger. Life suddenly is making heavy demands, plunging him into a crisis he is ill equipped to deal with.
Much of the film's charm is due to Dafoe's unforced, naturalistic acting, which invests his character with a calm, unself-conscious presence. Ed Lachman's sensitive photography, which often lingers on telling objects rather than the usual wide establishing shot, and a suitably melancholy soundtrack by Michael Been are the source of fine poetic inspirations and entrancing moods which draw us into the hero's journey as willing fellow travellers until the end.
In this coolly atmospheric film, Schrader explores with suspended truggles of a character on the margins of society. Light Sleeper is a deeply reflective mystery thriller that works admirably on more than one level.