Siesta (1987)

think it would be quite hard to include spoilers as few people seem to agree on what happened anyway. Roger Ebert's review seems very different than a version I have just seen, it must have been recut to make more sense at some point.I saw a this at a London test screening and the only clear memory is the beauty of Ellen Barkin and Marcus Miller and Miles Davis's music.This may be a spoiler but it is for the good of humanity, I never want to see the pus ugly oaf Alexei Sayle ever again, in any context, never mind sexual.For the gentlemen who asked about Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet, this is bassist/ composer (and mo fo) Marcus Miller

Sieata. A 90 minute sleep. This is the worst film made. A perfect example of how not to make a movie. How to avoid story, development, purpose. It can't even be surreal when it tries to be.It has no idea. Like most "art films" it's artless, and only paints boredom.It consists of characters doing nothing, but vague disconnected rambling, with no action. The only skillful part is Jodie Foster's English accent. Also a quirky poem from Sands.It's this kind of crap that puts me off films. I hate it.A review mentioned Jacob's Ladder. That skillful and powerful film showed how an original or different film can be made, with definite surreal moments - actual changes that can't occur in reality - scary scenes, excitement, with clear or specific messages and intentions you couldn't miss.This film called Sleep is utterly powerless. The dreariest dream with no intelligence. Even the "shock" ending seems implied.Erotic thriller? The first part (ho hum) is there, about as excessively as the other qualities. Minus 10 stars (for how many stars are in it).

Claire "On a Dare" wakes up by an airport runway wearing a red dress. She's dirty and bruised. She has no idea where she is or how she got there, or even what day it is, but she does remember who she is and retains most of her memories. She strips off her dress by a creek to wash off it and herself what seems to be blood, and sunbathes nude to dry off - sustained full-frontal nudity within the first two minutes of the movie, jeepers!I'm reminded of a line from the novel The Screaming Mimi by Frederic Brown, "There's murder before the story proper starts, and murder after it ends; the actual story begins with a naked woman and ends with one, which is a good opening and a good ending, but everything between isn't nice."Claire, finding the blood washes off her thinks someone else must be dead. Discovering and remembering that she is in Spain, she thinks she may have killed her ex-lover Augustine, or his new wife.Claire had been due to skydive without a parachute into a dormant (or artificial?) volcano covered with a net to catch her, that will be on fire. If she misses the net, or hits it after it has burned too much, she's dead in Death Valley. Receiving a letter from her ex-lover who doesn't want her to do the stunt, she flies to Spain to try to get him to return to her, despite her having been married to her promoter for six years or so.Claire has some strange adventures, sometimes pretty horrible. A fat taxi driver with tin dentures offers to help, but his price is sex, or rape. An eccentric brawling artist tries to help her, and doesn't seem to have any motive other than "the good you give out is returned to you."Sprinkled throughout are shots of Claire skydiving; like Roger Ebert, I couldn't tell if this was "fantasy [...] memory, or anticipation" not that it makes much difference. Throughout "falling" gets mentioned a lot in other ways. Claire, in a Catholic church says she feels like she is falling, the artist talks about how the only kind of falling that isn't failing is falling in love, etc.One thing the title seems to refer to is a siesta Claire's ex-lover takes in a small building near a church, where they perhaps used to have sex.Bruce Joel Rubin wrote a screenplay in the 1970s that was considered one of the best unproduceable scripts. This movie seems in a way an attempt to make it, though it is based on a novel. This movie didn't really do it for me, and perhaps time would be better spent reading the novel. Rubin's screenplay was produced a few years after this movie, and turned out quite well.

If you've seen Siesta and are puzzled, then read this spoilerWhen she wakes up by the stream, you hear a dog barking and then she gets into the taxi.Watching Siesta really made all my senses and my brain working at peak level. Very stimulating.Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) is a 1959 film based on Orpheus and Eurydice, thus Siesta could have been titled Female Orpheus but then that would not stimulate you as much.I'd like to get the DVD so I can see how many subliminal triggers I missed.