Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a LakeFrontRow.com feature that showcases one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker each week, every week. Brace thy face.
Judging “Wide Awake and Dreaming” solely for its focus on lucid dreams, where one realizes they are dreaming and can control their actions, might entice a comparison to Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, which explores philosophical ideas through a similar conceit. Director Dawnee Dodson does include a mention of “waking life” in her film’s dreamy omniscient narration, but any other comparisons are merely circumstantial. As opposed to Linklater’s dense, rambling efforts, Dodson offers a mercifully shorter abstraction on the liberating powers of lucid dreams.
“Wide Awake” documents the day-to-day aimlessness of Dorothy (Jenny Laszlo), a young woman whose boredom from working the laundromat is doubled by early sequences of still black & white photography. Prefaced by Maryam De Bonilla’s voiced over narration on the fleeting nature of happiness, Dodson’s static photographs pound home the monotony of Dorothy’s workday — that is, until a patron leaves behind a manuscript on lucid dreaming. Dodson suggests De Bonilla’s voiceover emanates from the manuscript’s very pages, seemingly talking to and about Dorothy at once. It’s the kind of dream logic that doesn’t make a great deal of sense, however any gaps in clarity are mostly erased when Dorothy begins to lucid dream, and her world is transformed into one of motion and vibrant color. A 2005 entry in the Wisconsin Film Festival’s “Wisconsin’s Own Experimental and Documentary Shorts,” Dodson’s short is less a narrative than it is an overt meditation, one whose form is sensibly tied to its function.