The many alluring wonders of Christopher Munch’s The
Sleepy Time Gal start with that title, seeming to promise a bedtime-worthy
child’s tale, but instead concerning itself with deep-rooted matters of separation
and absence, of lives still structured and shadowed by the events of decades
earlier. Its main character, Frances (one of Jacqueline Bisset’s best-ever
roles, her unexplained accent aiding the mysterious undercurrent) was once a
late-night radio broadcaster under the titular title, although that doesn’t
seem particularly important in how she assesses her own life; of the many
details and bits of personal history that tumble through the movie, the most hauntingly
recurring is the memory of the daughter she gave up for adoption, Rebecca,
played in adulthood by Martha Plimpton. Rebecca’s life as a New York corporate
lawyer bears little obvious relationship to that of the money-strapped Frances,
but Munch weaves in multiple correspondences, even suggesting the two women
may have slept with the same man, decades apart. The film has a recurring
lightness, an openness to possibility, yielding structurally unimportant but
pointedly lovely scenes such as Frances’ encounter with a French tourist who’s
out foraging for mushrooms, or a glimpse of her photographer son instructing a
subject to get naked, or many little bits of history and commemoration
(spanning George Washington to the dawn of a Black-oriented radio station); all
of this partially offset though by darker intimations (the other son is in
Britain, barely in contact, the movie suggesting he may be in dire straits). Munch’s
finely calibrated work ultimately denies the form of closure we might have
hoped for and expected (the two lead actresses never even share the same scene),
while beguilingly asserting a form of reconciliation and understanding that
transcend death and distance, intertwined with the power of art to forge
connections that would otherwise be beyond one’s imagination or grasp.
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