Sleep Dealer

In the US we are inured to dealing with corporate service centers with call takers that speak barely understandable English. This form of remote cross border servicing is one of the characteristics of globalization of work made possible by the internet. What this film does is imagine the next logical step: the similar globalization of manual labor. By means of robotics and the WWW, the film depicts a world where robotic drones in the US do all kind of menial and dangerous work while the brains that control the drones sit or stand in a third world country. It's the ultimate dreamworld for the US of A: work without the annoyance of immigrants.

While the near-reality sci-fi concept is clever, the film itself screens as an Hollywood B-movie. The acting and plot development styles will be familiar to the popcorn-eating crowd that populates the local shopping mall multiplex. The special effects are not that impressive (not surprising considering a 2.5 million dollar budget). There is a dated Star Wars bit with planes shooting at each other while flying through a canyon. It's tiresome if you don't dig this kind of infantile action scenes.

On the positive side, the film is peppered with clever manipulation of language, satirical takes on American impressions of foreigners, jabs at the excesses of capitalism, and inspired blending of present and future. The "coyotes" of today have been replaced by "coyoteks" who will, for a fee, pierce your skin with the appropriate hardware plugs (called nodes) that will enable you to directly connect your body to the internet and to vie for a job at a cyber "maquiladora". If you get such a job, you will send some of your salary to poor relatives back home in the countryside. Money transfers have been simplified, but there are so many fees and surcharges (think of your cell phone bill) that one third of the principal is pilfered by corporations and the government.

You can read more about this subject of remote work at the faux website www.cybracero.com (read cyber plus "bracero"). Check it.

On the net, users have gone beyond sharing personal data. Now they upload memories (yes, sucked out of one's brain) to the TruNode central database and sell them to interested readers. While plugged in -- literally -- TruNode will even sense if you are lying. More interesting or juicy memories, more money. It's the hyper-commercialization and surrender of the human soul.

The ultimate target is the privatization of water. Alas a sad development currently in progress. In good Hollywood fashion, a successful attack is gathered against that idea. The dream of revolt is not dead. Cyber poor of the world, rise up!

I liked the film and think it deserves more than a 6.2 so I gave it a high score to try and bump up it's overall score. It deserves about an 8. A really good film that tries to deal with the idea of a dehumanized black economy working for an ever increasingly fascistic USA. Some interesting idea's, some not so interesting. It definitely has a cyberpunk feel but being from Mexico it was always going to be different.

I am unsure of the budget but the film holds it's own and the sfx budget seems to have been spent wisely. The acting was good with the lead and support actors being enjoyable enough to watch. I also liked the score which was essentially Latin pop/dance.

The ending is a little unrealistic given the portrayed future realism of the rest of the film. A good film that is not the greatest sci-fi ever but deserves higher marks considering the obstacles the production team faced. A low budget, sci-fi drama from Mexico is not something you see everyday so it should be applauded.

Well, the above reviewer beat me to my warning: If you are some god forsaken film student, or "Hollywood" film buff, you will hate this film. The structure is open and allows for a great deal on viewer interpretation that most US film goers hate, and even fear. But I love, I love the director giving me images and direction, and then letting fill in some inferences and this not clearly delineated.

The film makes excellent cinematic use of cultural and social cyphers, and (I hate to say this almost for fear of "tainting" it; a slight magical realism to cast a wide net of meaning, not to tell some stupid plot arc formula. It is a brilliant, exciting, deeply satisfying movie (finally some one is talking abt these issues cinematically, and making a great movie), and I even found it fun. A well crafted daring film.

'Sleep Dealer' is a bright, shiny, hard-working little sci-fi movie that bristles with allegorical and literal messages about technological imperialism, globalization, the exploitation of foreign labor and other serious matters. It's also about the theme of Sterne's 'A Sentimental Journey:' a "traveler" who essentially stays at home--and about how the world's clamoring have-not South in the future will be as full of technology as the North, as indeed it is already. The means of exploitation will be extended into the land of the exploited.

What saves this heavy talk is a soulful innocent who's connected, or 'branché,' as the French say--in the most literal sense: he gets fitted with electronic "nodes" all along his arms, neck, and back, so he can be plugged to a central computer in at the border and thereby help America to achieve its fondest dream: making others do all the menial physical work, but without allowing them to enter the country. Thus Mexicans in virtual factories, at a distance, in 12-hour night shifts, walled off by a militarized barrier, do America's hard labor by proxy just outside the actual physical USA. Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), Sleep Dealer's young hero, comes to the "Sleep Dealers" in a mixture of desperation and hope, to save what's left of his little family in a rural village in Oaxaca.

Memo isn't a lily-white Candide. He has hope and love to give, but he also has a kind of primal curse upon him: he has caused disaster to his nearest and dearest by eavesdropping on a totalitarian northern force that sends drones to make strikes anywhere and blow up what it defines as "bad guys." They detected his radio, assumed he was an enemy, and brought down tragedy on his family. Both as penance and because nothing keeps him in the village any more, he goes to Tijuana, "the world's largest border town," and gets a pretty woman named Luz (Leonor Varela) whom he meets on the bus to fit him with the necessary set of body nodes. She calls herself a writer. Actually she works for a high tech firm that sells memories, and in this Orwellian world of spiritual deprivation, his experiences become fodder for her.

All the machinery in 'Sleep Dealer' is grotesque and comic but it works inexorably to serve the North. Farming has become impossible for Memo's father since the river was damed and a private company took control of the local water supply. In their part of Oaxaca the "future" has become a thing of the past, the father says. They must appease a machine that will shoot them if they disobey, just for permission to go to a river and collect water that they must pay for. Later another threatening gadget gobbles up Memo's 'Sleep Dealer' earnings and transfers them, minus a big fee and taxes, to his family further south. He can talk to his mother and brother on a videophone.

It seems an unintentional irony in Rivera and David Riker's screenplay that the man who ultimately helps Memo and his family, though of Hispanic origin, is an American "pilot,' himself "connected by nodes: the system not only stands for immigrants who can't work at home but for how technology alienates people from real work everywhere.

'Sleep Dealer' was made after a long struggle through Sundance financing, and got good buzz at the Sundance Festival itself. Because the Hispanic-oriented distributor Maya is buying the film and may finance a substantial stateside theatrical release, Rivera was saying in December, it may have a better fate than the mere straight-to-DVD issue Justin Chang of 'Variety' predicted. It's hard to see why Chang, who did acknowledge the film's colorful visuals and "A for effort" f/x, indeed remarkably polished and stylish and at times even mind-blowing considering the low budget, describes Peña, who's like a combination of Javier Bardem and Robert Downey, Jr., as "a blank." The actor makes a sympathetic little man hero in the classic picaresque mold, and the film's story dramatizes its theme of how immigrants are at once exploited and excluded in a way that's not only full of vividness and irony, but trippy. Though Rivera said his real models are more in sci-fi literature than film, one can see why he'd also describe Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' as "the Holy Grail." Rivera made the film in Spanish in Mexico, but is an American whose first language is English. One parent is from the US and the other from Lima, Peru, and he grew up in New Jersey. He has previously explored global have/have-not issues in documentary formats.

Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It was also in the New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center.

This is one of those movies that you watch and slowly "connect" to its reality. Many people disliked that. It was either to slow compared to most of the movies today or too intense an experience to people that don't like the feeling of immersion into something else. However, from what I am sitting, it was a great movie.

First of all, one must take a step back from the usual reviewer practice and take into account that all the actors in the movie are Mexican and so is the writer/director. I don't know what budget the movie had, but it was well done in acting, atmosphere, plot, details and special effects. Winning the Sundance festival (and not being about crazy people) should also count in its favor.

Second of all, I really enjoyed the movie. It has the feel of films like Blade Runner, only it hits really closer to home. Luis Fernando Peña was a real good choice for the main role, even if it wasn't a very challenging one. As in many good movies, the main character was the idea, the plot, and the actors were just slipping into their niche.

Bottom line: this is a sci-fi movie that needs to be seen. Whatever faults it has, they are far surpassed by its qualities. The social message is just as important as the vision of a future where we can have whatever we wish for, only that we wished wrong. See it. It is worth it.