Woody Allen
Sleeper

"How did you find out about sex?" "Me? From my mother. When I was little I asked her: where do babies come from? She understood 'bullets' and told me 'from the gun'. When a lady in the building had triplets, I thought it was a triple-barrel."

A fierce satire on ignorance, non-culture, and superficiality, this is what "Sleeper," an inspired film by Woody Allen from 1973, aims to be. Allen tells the bizarre story of Miles Monroe, a vegetarian restaurateur and Jazz musician, who is mistakenly frozen in 1973 and awakened in 2173 by a group of doctors opposing the Leader, the supreme ruler of the post-nuclear holocaust world.

The central theme of the film is precisely to denounce the danger of a progressive loss of cultural identity marking a people too permissive towards the overwhelming power of mass media and false culture. The phantom figure of the Leader symbolizes the real possibility that people lacking culture and driven by a thirst for power could easily govern the destinies of entire nations, or worse, the world; it is no coincidence that the Leader appears on television screens as a benign person, sitting with his dog on a hill at sunset, greeting his people, and smiling, always smiling (does that remind you of anyone?). The society of 2173, painted by Allen, is not doing too badly; everyone has their nice houses and tiny cars, a sort of small happy reality, yet they are inhabited by utterly clueless and ignorant people who have no idea what it means to have their own personality. A character who fully embodies the traits of this empty populace is the poet Luna (Diane Keaton), superficial, completely devoid of talent but at the same time regarded as a genius by her society.

"I absolutely don't want to hear about it. The world is full of wonderful things. Why does there have to be something that comes out to spoil it all? I mean, why does there have to be resistance? After all, there's the globe, there's the telescreen, and there's the Orgasmatron!"

The globe, the telescreen, and the Orgasmatron, three objects that enslave these pseudo-men, are famous in the scene of the party at Luna's house where her friends (dressed by Allen intentionally with sweatshirts featuring swastikas and other ominous symbols worn unintentionally) first pass the globe, an intoxicating sphere that makes people happy and stupid at the same time, and then take a tour inside the Orgasmatron, a booth for sexual pleasures.

Luna: Do you want to perform a sexual act with me?
Miles: Perform? I'm not sure I'm up for an actual performance. However, we can have a dress rehearsal if you like.

Allen makes the film a masterpiece of comedy conveyed through images, the visual gags dominate the film, it is thus still an Allen who draws on the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton, managing to create 88 minutes of pure fun and brilliance; regarding the futuristic themes, the inspiration comes from the "Science Fiction" genre, particularly Bradbury and Huxley, but also a bit from Orwell's "1984."

Some trivia: the soundtrack is written and played by Allen himself, and this is the first film with Diane Keaton, Woody's great muse and also his partner for a short period.