Sadly Over-hyped

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Let Me Dream Again (1900) *** 1/2 (out of 4)Clocking in at less than two minutes, this is a pretty funny movie that shows a middle aged man drinking, smoking and flirting with a beautiful young woman. The man is having a terrific time until he wakes up and realizes that in bed with him is his rather unattractive wife. LET ME DREAM AGAIN is a pretty simple film but for 1900 it was rather clever and used the dream sequence for a great cause. George Melies was using dream sequences to show off horrors and magic tricks but this here was clever use of it because we get a very big laugh. I thought it was rather hilarious when the man woke up and the facial expression when he sees his wife was extremely good.

An old man flirts with a pretty young woman and gets very amorous, only for the reality of his situation to become horribly apparent to him! This is a very simple film with one gag to deliver and a short time to do it in. The joke is funnier than it sounds mainly because the manner of delivery of the punch line is good. It has enough time at the end to milk the gag so it does tend to work. Contrast this with the French short that repeated it less successfully the following year where the delivery was the problem and the punch line felt like it was delivered in a rush without allowing the actors to react.Of more note is the way that the film moves from dream sequence to reality. The film goes out of focus and when it returns we are in the second scene. It is now a common effect and we all clearly know what it means but this film was the first known example of it being used.

The same night I watched this silent short, I also saw a French film called "Rêve et réalité" (1901). It turns out the French movie was a knockoff of this film--with the exact same plot and scenes! While it was common for many of the very early studios to plagiarize each other's work, this one is one of the more flagrant examples. I just hope that LET ME DREAM AGAIN is the actual first film of its kind and not a rip-off of another, earlier film! The story is immensely simple (as was true of nearly all films from this era). An old guy is making out with a pretty young lady and life seems grand--until he wakes up and realizes it's all a dream! The idea is cute, though the execution is a tad primitive and rough. Still, given its tremendous age, it's still pretty watchable today.

Another familiar trope that will seem poignant to many people. A man is wining and dining a young lady only to wake up beside an old shrew who gives him what for. The master of this dream/reality narrative is Buster Keaton, who developed it with heartbreaking inventiveness.This film is not without interest though. Firstly, the dream sequence is excellently imagined, with the couple dining in the foreground and a blank background creating a suitably unreal effect. The symmetry between couples is effective, suggesting that the wife may once have been like this one, asking us to ponder the processes that led to her 'decline', even the possibility of the husband's malign influence. Of course, this symmetry is actually a representation of rupture, division, disharmony - between dream and reality, the ideal and the mundane, the young and the old, the unattainable and the attainable.The strange thing about the dream is that, firstly, the woman is unattainable in it, she flirts, but she doesn't give herself; secondly, she is dressed in a costume reminiscent of the circus or carnival. Here the dream is something subversive, something that can critique the failures, the repressions, the dissatisfactions of real life. It also points to the use most people make of the cinema, to dream about better lives than our own, lives we can see but cannot have. It is this melancholy vein that helps the film transcend misogyny.