Dream One (1984)

I got engrossed in this movie called 'Dream One' (1984) that was on UTV World Movies yesterday. It's one of those bloody surrealistic movies that work on the usual cliches associated with dreams. However, it seems to replenish each obvious moment with a simple exploration of society, genocide, politics, gender and identity, urbanisation... and the league. It's so subtle and hardly pretentious, that you can give them all a miss, and just be rapt in the film's close-to real pictorisation of the randomness of a dream.  

It works on a young boy's fantasy filled with essentially surreal, magnified and horribly ethereal plot(s) that serve a full course meal for all the Freudians out there. I shan't talk much of the story here, for it might be a sinful act considering it's a dream that involves pieces of Alice in Wonderland, Zorro and the Nautilus . The characters evolve, or should I say, let us discover more about them as the interlaced plots progress, making for this movie that tramps about.

Time, morality, ethics, even space, are given a pass throughout and it moves towards a moot of survival and selfishness against these.

I tried googling the movie to find out more about its circumstances and after a few good minutes only did I learn, it's better known as Nemo, and was the first movie of French Director Arnaud Sélignac. Riddance to my amazement that the Englishman could have actually written such a movie back then. As for the actors, only Dominique Pinon (the obsessive lover at the cafe in Amelie), dressed 'Monkey' in this film, seems familiar to me. Nevertheless, the cast and crew have staged quite a bold creation. The sets of the film prod on the faked Appolo mission, I guess. Background score is rightly supportive and non-intrusive. The dialogues,  especially of the magician, Mr. Rip, haggle over a lot of philosophical parodies, while the young Nemo's is so darn Brit with all the bland exclamations intact. 

It isn't disappointing to see a 4.8/10  for this classic movie, that deserves an 8, on IMDB -seemingly the only site that has substantial info on the film. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087784/ >  I might sound like a contradiction with all my sentimental echoes of the film here, but it certainly is different from all those kitschy movies on dream-ing/s/land. Being as banal and dumb as possible.

It just seems right now to remember it as a French more than an English movie. A delightful watch on a lazy late afternoon. Ahoy Nemo and the Nautilus!