Light Sleeper

In the world of Paul Schrader films, if Taxi Driver was Part 1 and American Gigolo Part 2, then Light Sleeper is certainly Part 3. The similarities are so evident, they cannot be passed by. We have here Schrader's unsympathetic hero, a detached, outcast protagonist on a path (though he does not know it) to spiritual redemption. According to Schrader, over the course of these three films, the hero has moved from “anger” to “narcissism” to “anxiety.” In Light Sleeper Dafoe plays a 40-year-old drug runner, John LeTour, suffering a mid-life crisis. A former user, now he's just a delivery boy riding in the back of a limo through the streets of New York to his next meet. The buyers are all upscale thrill-seekers, students, yuppies and Eurotrash. LeTour remembers a time when drugs were pleasurable, a time before crack came along and ruined the scene. When he runs into his old girlfriend Marianne (Delany), herself a reformed user, she points out the romantically selective nature of his memory and describes their years together as a cycle of scoring and coming down. LeTour's pragmatic and longtime boss Ann (Sarandon) is on the verge of leaving the business and starting a line of herbal cosmetics, a career move that will leave LeTour out of work. A conscientious believer in luck -- good, bad or otherwise -- this Light Sleeper has resonances of the superstitious Drugstore Cowboy, with their shared belief in totems, signs and portents so meaningful to those functioning outside the law. Always, the movie's knock-out performances are governed by Schrader's controlling aesthetic with its stylized, almost hyper-real visuals and reticent, yet in retrospect telling, script. Images that remain vivid are things like the sight of the Manhattan streets piling higher and higher with bags of garbage as a sanitation strike continues unresolved throughout the course of the movie. (It's as though Travis Bickle's scum-drenched streets have now become literal.) An unshakable image is the way in which LeTour writes his thoughts compulsively in a hardback notebook and upon reaching the last line on the last page, tosses the used-up journal in the trash, walks across the room to grab a new, empty notebook from a stack and continues his aimless writing. For me, Light Sleeper comes the closest to capturing on film the ethos of Lou Reed's musical opus “Street Hassle,” one of the most eloquent urban visions of our time. (“Some people have no choice/ they can never find a voice/ to talk with, that they can call their own./ So the first thing that they see/ that allows them the right to be, they follow it./You know what it's called?/ Bad luck.”) Light Sleeper represents Schrader at his best, giving us a character we've become familiar with over the years and Schrader's intimate mastery of our fascination with decadence, loss and redemption.