The Best Movie Ever | Dreams

Were we dreaming, or wasn’t Before I Wake supposed to come out this week? Well, plans change, and what we once accepted as our reality sometimes slips away in real life, as it always does in our sleeping moments. We’re not letting a little thing like an altered release date get in our way here at The Best Movie Ever. We’re doing an installment all about the best movies about dreaming anyway, because we can, and because we kind of already prepared this article in advance. 

So anyway, what is the best movie ever made about dreams, dreaming and so forth? We asked our panel of critics – Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and Collider’s Brian Formo – to each pick just one film that stands out as the very best “dream movie” ever, and as usual they all came back with very different picks. Find out what they chose, let us know which dream movie is your favorite, and come back next Wednesday for an all-new, highly debatable (and probably more topical) installment of The Best Movie Ever!

Also: Every Richard Linklater Movie | Ranked!

Brian Formo’s Pick: Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Films du Losange

Most of the time I experience dreams of shifting locations. When awaking, I latch on to one object, one setting, or the ending as the definition of a dream I just had, and everything else that occurred in the dream disintegrates from my memory (or at least becomes disconnected in a way that no longer makes sense).  Jacques Rivette’s three hour (plus!) art-house behemoth, Celine and Julie Go Boating is two things for me, it’s the most realistically dreamlike film I’ve ever experienced (including the disintegrating build-up to the big finale) and also the best portrayal of lucid dreaming (where the dreamer can affect the dream to have an outcome they want, because they are aware they are dreaming).

Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) are two women who become linked in action, and their identities meld. If one reads a book about magic, the other is a magician. If one underlines book passages with red ink, the other paints in red (and they both wear red lipstick). After a series of many linked objects and actions, the young women find themselves in some ghost-lesbian-murder-mystery that plays on loop. A house with a mourning father is stuck in limbo where his stepdaughters daily re-enact a murder. Celine and Julie experience this in the foreground and, as we do in dreams when we’re aware we’re not partaking in what we’re seeing, begin to test how they’ll be noticed or what they can get away with in the presence of this scene.

What occurs is curious, funny, and delightful. But what aids Celine and Julie in maintaining the dreamlike atmosphere is that the viewer forgets so much of the coded set-up once they’re in the house. And because the film is hard to find, and only rarely screened, those elements cannot be easily revisited to piece together each item and what it could mean. Just like a dream, you’re only left with the fragments you latch onto and attempt to explain.

Witney Seibold’s Pick: Eraserhead (1977)

Criterion

Director David Lynch has been notoriously reluctant to offer interpretations of his films, and has even been historically coy about offering even the simplest of descriptions. Why rely on base words when the film itself is already speaking to you? When asked to give a description of his 1977 debut feature Eraserhead Lynch used the phrase “A dream of dark and troubling things.” No description could be more accurate or more concise. The film is troubling, it is dark, and the entire affair may or may not be a dream. Or perhaps a dream within a dream. It’s certainly film from a realm out of step with any sort of recognizable waking world. 

Eraserhead, set in a semi-abstract city-scape of smoke, shadow, and dirt, is a living nightmare. Its hero, Henry Spencer, seems to be perpetually afraid. His skin is without color, his posture eternally hunched. He lives in an apartment smaller than yours. His girlfriend is pregnant with something that may or may not be a baby. His only escape is a series of visions – or dreams – of a cancerous woman living inside his radiator. 

The glorious interior logic of Eraserhead is impeccable. While we may not be able to make sense of the imagery, we seem to understand what Eraserhead is on a strangely intense, and deeply hidden, emotional level. What David Lynch has done is strip away all the conventional trappings of conventional melodrama, and replaced them with abstract feeling. And that feeling is fear. Unadulterated, unsure, unusual, unequivocal fear. Eraserhead is a dream. Sometimes a dream within a dream.

When you wake up from a nightmare, you are afraid of what you have just experienced in the non-waking world, but, now awake, you may not be sure why you were afraid. Nothing made sense, you say to yourself. Eraserhead captures that anxiety, that fear, that horror of waking up. And, more chillingly, it points out something vital about the way human emotions function: They don’t make sense. Meaning is a distant affect. Fear is real. 

William Bibbiani’s Pick: Waking Life (2001)

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Richard Linklater is one of our most realistic directors. He tells us stories of such specificity that their honesty, their “truth” is difficult to dispute; even if don’t necessarily care for all of his films, they cannot be denied. So Linklater’s attempt to capture a constant, dreamlike state of being is perhaps his greatest filmmaking challenge, even more so than his many other experiments. In Waking Life he plunges his audience into the free-flowing subconscious of Wiley Wiggins, a young man who flits from bizarre scenario to bizarre scenario, and gradually comes to realize that he may never wake up. Assuming, of course, that he is even asleep.

Rotoscoped by many different animators, in many different styles, Waking Life looks like no dream I have ever had. The actors seem barely held together by form and substance. The colors are vibrant for no other sake than their own. And the articulate nature of Wiggins’ fantasies (again, if you can even call them that) are more cogent than you typically experience when you close your eyes. But the grand philosophical concepts being presented by an endless parade of odd characters – some of whom may be familiar – are mind expanding in the way the greatest bonkers REM experience can provide. 

By the end, Waking Life threatens to return you back to the real world, but not before challenging the very way you experience life itself. Eyes wide, eyes shut, maybe there’s no difference. Or maybe – even scarier – the “reality” that we live in, that Richard Linklater spends most of his career carefully cataloguing – is the real hallucination, and experiencing the entirety of existence constantly, at the same time, is the way we were always supposed to live. Sleep on THAT, won’t you?

Previously on The Best Movie Ever:

Top Photo: Films du Losange / Criterion / Fox Searchlight