Cultures meld, bend and dissipate under the dry Brazilian sun in Sleep With Your Eyes Open (Nele Wohlatz, 2024), a discursive and digressive project that’s precise in tone, yet imprecise in its gestures. Weaving a delicate narrative of dislocation across a series of fragmented postcard entries, its playfulness is both inviting and disorientating. Like drinking too many caipirinhas by the beach.
Talking of caipirinhas, the Taiwanese Kai (Liao Kai Ro), striking up a conversation with an Argentine German-to-Spanish translator on the beach, initially thinks that they are a type of food. She then tells him that translation is futile, as we can “hardly understand each other in our own language.”
It’s the first of many culture clashes throughout the film, made handier by the indication that yellow subtitles are for Portuguese, and white for Spanish, English and Mandarin. But as Wohlatz’ film posits — moving between languages as often as the camera cuts from one position to another — it is this very cultural confusion that everyone has in common.
Jilted by her boyfriend at the airport, Kai arrives in Recife alone. We are told that tourists rarely come to this city — a fact that seems dispelled by a quick Google search, but works to stress the uniqueness of her lonely project. At first, this appears to be another quirky character study about a holiday gone wrong. Especially when the air conditioning unit malfunctions. But this small detail brings her to borrow some pliers from migrant worker and umbrella shop owner Fu Ang (Wang Shin-Hong) — a mainland national hoping to make it big in South America. His only problem: the rainy season refuses to arrive.
Disappointment collects like sand in your shoe in this part of the world. For Chinese immigrants, moving from town to town in search of work, fighting racism and precarious job contracts along the way, the chances of finding a place you can call home — especially when the mother country is progressing past recognisability — this inner melancholia is multiplied; often caught in DOP Roman Kasseroller’s languorous slow takes, Wohlatz preferring to work on careful blocking over any flashy camera movements.
When Fu Ang goes missing, Kai finds a box of postcards from the past, written as part of a non-fiction novel. Our narrator is Chinese-via-six-years-in-Argentina-transplant Xiao Xin (Chen Xiao Xin), an observational, smart girl as reserved as Kai is kooky and straightforward. The resultant non-linear story reflects the elliptical approach of postcard writing, with scenes often ending in the middle of their telling, the absence of particular moments highlighting the transient nature of migrant life.
Highlighting the irony: the postcards of Recife, written to no one in particular, were made in China. Xiao Xin is not only writing to herself back in China but perhaps the idea she once held of South America in her head before she emigrated. Life is never what we imagine, etc, etc.
With a deep sense of ironic sadness throughout, this a very thoughtful and well-done film. I appreciated the unorthodox commitment to narrative form, with an elasticity in storytelling that doubles back to locate the enigmatic glue that sticks us all together.
Yet, something holds me at a remove: whether it’s the lack of dramatic action, big emotional scenes or that one moment that holds both past and present all at once. But I get the sense that loud or attention-grabbing gestures aren’t Wohlatz’ style. And perhaps they don’t suit the characters either, sensitive yet unlikely to let loose in search of generic catharsis. It makes for an easy film to like. It makes for a hard one to love.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.