Som­nil­o­quies – first look review

This extra­or­di­nary new ​“doc­u­men­tary” (air quotes ness­esary) from Ver­e­na Par­avel and Lucien Cas­tiang-Tay­lor slinks into the mind of musi­cian Don McGre­gor who, pri­or to his pass­ing in 1994, was con­sid­ered to be one of the most pro­lif­ic sleep talk­ers of the mod­ern age. He was sub­ject to sci­en­tif­ic tri­als and his afflic­tion became the focus of stud­ies into noc­tur­nal brain activ­i­ty. But the direc­tors pur­pose­ful­ly offer no more con­text than that, as their film is one that invites (nay, demands) impo­si­tion and inter­pre­ta­tion of the abstract sounds and images they offer up.

Hand­i­ly, McGregor’s sleep mono­logues (or, som­nil­o­quies) were taped by his room­mate dur­ing the 1960s, and they are played over scenes of warped, hazy bod­ies in a kind of ecsta­t­ic repose. It’s a deep sleep, as you can hear the blar­ing car horns from the street out­side act­ing as a stac­ca­to rhythm sec­tion to his loqua­cious bleat­ing. That’s all it is for 77 min­utes. And it’s spellbinding.

The ways that the wind­ing mono­logues have been specif­i­cal­ly ordered means that the film zips across a broad spec­trum of pent-up emo­tions, and McGregor’s intu­itive war­blings jack­knife between bawdy com­e­dy and doomed shriek­ing in an instant. And yet what he says is, for the most part, remark­ably artic­u­late. More artic­u­late and amus­ing than some stand-up rou­tines by wak­ing comics, in fact. From the light­ly posh, grav­el­ly inflec­tion of his voice, he sounds a lot like John Waters star­let, Divine, and in fact, much of what he says could fea­ture in a Waters gross-out spec­tac­u­lar, or a par­tic­u­lar­ly warped Robert Crumb com­ic strip.

The direc­tors’ pre­vi­ous film, Leviathan, explored the micro­cosm of indus­tri­al fish­ing prac­tices by cap­tur­ing pure process with zero expla­na­tion. In many ways, this film plays the same game of cin­e­mat­ic hide and seek with the mys­tery of human sleep pat­terns, as it serves up a kind of extra-sen­so­ry audio­vi­su­al base mate­r­i­al for the view­er to mould, shape and destroy at will.

It’s pos­si­ble to build a char­ac­ter por­trait of McGre­gor from what he says, as it reveals a lot about his erot­ic yearn­ings and unspo­ken pec­ca­dil­los. But we don’t know whether he is unlock­ing secrets, or this is just an hon­est reflec­tion of his real per­sona. Or whether it’s none of the above, and the things he talks about are just ran­dom, sub­con­scious rants that hap­pen to skirt on the obscene. We don’t even know for cer­tain whether he’s actu­al­ly asleep and that he and his room mate aren’t con­duct­ing a sur­re­al ruse.

The range of sub­jects spo­ken about cov­ers a com­mu­ni­ty of midgets that you can hire out to replace your chil­dren, the ​“plat­inum bush” of a mys­te­ri­ous (and repeat­ed­ly men­tioned) Mrs Dan­ger­field, a pair of giants who rape a woman in an ambu­lance, and some brash artic­u­la­tions that don’t appear to be in any known lan­guage. The bod­ies on screen form ran­dom con­fig­u­ra­tions that Par­avel and Cas­tiang-Tay­lor turn into live-action Rorschach blots, needling the viewer’s own erot­ic sub­con­scious in the process. The film looks like a Fran­cis Bacon can­vas come to life.

Despite its moody, capri­cious tone, Som­nil­o­quies is a joy­ous and affir­ma­tive work, one that’s fas­ci­nat­ed by the idio­syn­crasies of the human body and stands as an angu­lar tes­ta­ment to the infi­nite depths of the psy­che, and maybe even the soul.