Sleeper

Woody Allen's comedy set in the future. Miles runs a small health food shop in the twentieth century. Something goes wrong during a simple operation and he is frozen. He is woken two hundred years later. The world he wakes into is a police state, and the people who woke him are the underground resistance; because Miles has no record he is the only usable person. The humour is largely physical: chases, falls, disguises. Allen leans openly on the silent comedy tradition and some passages run without dialogue. The second layer mocks visions of the future: the things said to be good for you turning out two hundred years later to be the opposite, automated household devices that do not work, and a regime sustaining itself through a nose. Diane Keaton plays the poet Luna, one of the films the pair made together. The music rests on the jazz tradition of an earlier period and Allen contributes on clarinet. An enjoyable example in genre terms for anyone who likes early Woody Allen and science-fiction parody. For a viewer expecting a mature narrative, the film is built on a series of gags and the story exists to connect them.