Sleep Furiously

The oxymoronic and enigmatically titled "Sleep Furiously" is the slowest film you will ever see. First-time director, producer and cinematographer Gideon Koppel portrays Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany.

Over the seasons of a year, we are witness to the remorseless decline of a rural way of life that is serene but sentimentalised. There is no narration and no narrative and the dialogue - much of it in Welsh - is often banal, yet there are some stunning scenes and the whole thing has a certain elegiac charm.

During the performance, my young Welsh friend leaned over to my half-Welsh wife and commented: "Now I remember why I left Wales".

This film is a joy.

Its wider messages of rural decay are evident but its specific scenes are portraits of individuals, relationships, landscapes and history that are worthy of consideration independent of the bigger theme.

A yellow mobile library is allowed Big Picture time to cross a whole screensworth of green Welsh mountain. This beautiful scene alone is worth the watch. The library's aesthetic and romantic appeals hold hands with the utilitarian demands of its users who value and use this service.

Meeting points are charted and cherished - school, the fair, church, shops, sheepdog trials, tea.

Weather and the seasons frame but don't constrain the 'story'.

The past is present, maybe the future is not, but this film is about now and, though (I feel) elegiac, not morbid.

The unscripted (but deftly edited) humour (non-compliant sheep, frozen posted owls and mobile library health & safety, that would all do Coogan/Brydon/Gervais proud) adds both lightness and gravity to the mix.

The darkest picture in the film, a curtain flapping in a deserted farm house near the film's end recalls 'Time Passes' in Virginia Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse'; the message may not be hopeful, but this film finds Lily Briscoe's line.

A documentary about a Welsh farming community that is struggling to survive. Despite some beautiful scenic shots the film is awkwardly edited and of excessive duration. Many shots are long with little happening in them. It is not a good sign when you're desperately waiting for the film to end. This film does the farming community no favours. Some history, context and explanations for the village's demise would have given the film a clear purpose but we get little more than disconnected shots which are supposedly intended to have meaning but end up close to meaningless. The word 'pretentious' comes to mind. By the end of the documentary I didn't care if the community survived! Half the residents appeared to be English anyway! (I did sleep for a while, and yes, furiously).

I loved this film - I loved the slow pace of it, the meditative quality, the way it reflected the quieter slower rate at which village & agricultural life turns.

The space & time devoted to "little happening" was perfect for me - especially when it was showing the beauty of the Welsh landscape.

The simplicity & honesty of the tales, allowed to naturally come across was beautiful & reminded me of David Lynch's "Straight Story".

The way that the village, community & the surrounding agriculture seemed ancient, only moving with the seasons was deftly shown. Poignantly, simultaneously the film also showed it was worryingly at imminent risk of losing some of its essential aspects.

If you can't sit still for 5 minutes & enjoy a setting sun, running river or rolling hillside, if you can't remain quiet & enjoy the silence, then this film's probably not for you. I'm afraid there isn't even a single car chase (only a brief sheep chase).

For everyone else, turn down the revs & sink into this low-key masterpiece. ______________

Update after Celia's comments - I don't understand why everything needs to have some perfectly realised & resolved answer - life's not like this, sometimes we never find out what happens, and sometimes our lives are simply enriched by inexplicable yet beautiful things (like this film).

This is the sort of film that is a soft target for accusations of "pretension" (or Celia's "Emperor's New Clothes") but there really is no pretence/pretension that this is going to be a normal A->B->C narrative, it's just not what it is. It's broadly filmed as documentary, but not a prescriptive one. What it is to me at least is a beautifully shot vignette, with snapshots, snippets & moments of many lives and stories, none of which does it try to fully provide a resolution.

Yes I've got questions I'd like answered (my friend wondered did the librarian ever use the laptop for anything more than a place to stamp the books?) but I don't expect to get the answers from the film itself, and that's OK by me.

The closest thing I've seen to it is the Patrick Keiller masterpieces "London" & "Robinson In Space" yet they are scripted, narrated & very thought out mixing esoteric elements of art, history, poetry, economics trivia and wit, all together again with great photography. The simpler more natural (no commentary, no sign of a behind-camera interviewer) version perhaps makes for a less focused film, but also one I just allowed myself to go with its slow, winding, meditative pace.

After this film I struggled to collect my thoughts, and that's because really I felt like I had been watching two films, one a banal parochial documentary about decrepit ways of living in the sticks, and the other a mannered appreciation of Welsh landscape. The film for me is a conflation, how to square on one hand seeing time lapse photography of a baby sleeping, then a pulsating tarn with a dark and bizarre copse of trees in the middle of a wasteland, and on the other senile conversations about next to nothing, too hellish for Beckett to contemplate. There's no narration so as a viewer I was left with little context.

The artist has a personal vision of a place which in my opinion he is trying to conflate into something universal to a community. His photography of an auction of farm items is beautiful and baroque, and yet to the people at the auction, that's not what they're seeing at all, they see function not form. Gideon Koppel's images feel to me like those of an outsider. Two authentic movies seem to me to jar together and produce something more confused.

There are many beautiful images in Sleep Furiously, my favourites are a time lapse of a pair of tautly billowing curtains and a piece of glistening spider web by a collapsed curtain rail. Quite what to make of the non-experimental elements is difficult, are we seeing an elegy, or is what is being lost nothing to mourn at all, a vegetable lifestyle thrown back from more religious days when folks would read The Pilgrim's Progress and conclude that the pathway to heaven was accessed via drudgery?