Sleepwalking Land - Perverse Dreams
Thoughts On: Sleepwalking Land (Terra Sonâmbula, 2007)
Made by Teresa Prata, this is the Mozambican film of the series.
Sleepwalking Land is a perverse yet sentimental expression of the impact of war. Civil war crippled Mozambique from its independence in the late 70s all the way through to the early 90s. Sleepwalking Land is based off of a novel by highly acclaimed writer, Mia Couto, Mozambican son of Portuguese emigrant parents, who lived and worked as a writer through the civil war period. He bases Sleepwalking Land at the end of the civil war period, having us follow an older man who rescues a young boy from a refugee camp. Picking up from here, Prata's adaptation follows this boy who has no memory and no family, and the old man, who comes to be his uncle and father figure, as they wander in the country-side scratching for food, avoiding conflict and bandits. Much of the film is then set in a proverbial wasteland in which death is familiar and life a bizarre perversion; a dream of sorts. We therefore stray with our characters as they cling to signs of life with muted hope and irrational action. In such, we see the young boy rescue a goat and chase him through potential minefields, mirroring the risk the old man takes in bringing the boy under his wing; we come across an old man who traps and attempts to bury the couple in hopes of seeding a tree that can give birth to new humans and repopulate his desolated village; we are introduced to a father torturing his daughter, strapping her to a barrel to develop some kind of form or skill she can make money from in a circus; and, as becomes the central theme of the plot, the boy finds a diary detailing the journey of a stranger whose family are killed in war, leading him to wander until he meets a woman on a ship he falls in love with, thereupon promising her to find her lost son - who the boy begins to believe he is and so starts a journey to unite with this so-called lost mother. There is no particular sense or reason behind our characters' motivation beyond an existential search for an escape; a reprieve from the desolation and doom surrounding them. In this we can sense an archetypal magnetism toward feminine shelter that is ultimately corrupted by violence.
Though conceptually evocative, Sleepwalking Land lacks a certain poignancy. Its most expressive notion comes with the aphoristic belief expressed by the old man that all life on earth came from the soil and differentiated from humanity for their own joy. In conflict with this is his following notion that the earth dares humanity to dream. We see dreams manifest as delusion throughout Sleepwalking Land and therefore bring joy; but in the context of war, these dreams only manifests perverse and distorted images of violence: a father torturing his daughter, a goat destroyed by explosives, a lover gunned down, an old man trying to bury a child. The translation of this to drama and structure lacks punctum in my view with sexuality - including a disturbing depiction of sexual initiation in which the old man fondles the young boy - constantly distracting from a palpable sense of humanity. Indeed there is a consistent conflict between life and death, sexuality being an intermediary, but the sum of this produces no poignancy and the narrative more alienating than photogénic. Nonetheless an expression of bizarre existential desperation, Sleepwalking Life gives insight into the contortion war has upon dreams and aspiration.
