Sleeper

A comic parody on the science-fiction genre which is widely regarded as Allen’s first mature film with a typically Allen theme: politics and sexuality. The critic Tony Rayns used Sleeper to write about Allen’s films: ‘More than any movies since the heyday of the Marx Brothers, his are battlefields, struggles for dominance between discipline of narrative form and the anarchy of unrelated gags, verbal and visual.’Allen directed himself as the anti-hero and former jazz clarinetist Miles Monroe. Miles was admitted to hospital in 1973 for a minor operation on his digestive tract. Thanks to a concerned friend, and an administrative mix-up, Miles was frozen. Two hundred years later, in 2173, Miles is thawed out in a futuristic laboratory by doctors who want to use him in their resistance battle. The United States as known to Miles no longer exists. After a nuclear war, everything has changed in a land under dictatorship where all citizens are recorded in the government’s databases and everyone blindly obeys the Great Leader. Only Miles is not in the system and the Resistance wants to exploit this fact.Sleeper is not only a parody on the science-fiction film, it also refers to the era of silent slap-stick: for instance, Allen dangles helplessly on a piece of tape from the window, he throws a plate of disgusting blue food in the face of a guard, he fights with a pudding that gets bigger and bigger, in various scenes he has old-fashioned ‘knock-’em-over’ fights and he balances on a ladder as it slides back and forth.