Sleeping Sickness | Review

German writer-director Ulrich Kohler’s Sleeping Sickness is a quietly absorbing, subtly disarming movie about middle-aged German foreign aid doctor Ebbo Velten, who is preparing to relocate back to Europe after spending 20 years overseeing medical clinics in remote areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Though his wife and teenage daughter are fully committed to the move, Ebbo is having second thoughts. But is it love of place, hatred of self, or fear of change that keeps him clinging to the Cameroon jungle?

Lived-in performances impress all around; Kohler & DP Patrick Orth use a doc-like HD shooting style to immerse us in the various African environments, from dilapidated city to deep jungle outpost. Basic story elements are there, but for Kohler narrative is secondary to behavioral observation. He has a keen knack for the telling incidental gesture, and says more with the subtle dynamics of meandering after-dinner conversation than most directors could with the most over-compensatory plot points. For all his attention to naturalistic detail, however, Kohler’s approach isn’t exclusively materialistic — the magical may also play a part.

Kohler splits the movie into two halves, each with its own protagonist. The first section follows Ebbo (Dutch actor Pierre Bokma pulls off an authentic combination of skeptical and needy, crabby and sacrificing), whose anxiety grows with the encroachment of his departure date from Africa. A trivial complaint to a waiter; a sharp remark to an employee; the latent aggression of Ebbo tossing his disinterested daughter into a swimming hole when all she wants is to text her friends from the shade: Small, symptomatic moments reverberate. A highlight is a scene of Ebbo and his wife of 20-something years in bed, which perfectly portrays the semi-sibling familiarity — the un-urgent but tangible, tender but resentful, desire — that two people in a long-term relationship (un)easily share.

The second protagonist is Alex Nzila, a young black doctor in France, of Congolese extraction, who is sent to Cameroon by Ebbo’s funders to check up on the program he runs to treat a widespread epidemic of “sleeping sickness.” As Alex, Jean-Cristophe Folly has a less developed character to work with, but he adequately delivers a bass line of consternation, indicating a man who has yet to find a place in the world in which he fits. Incorrectly assumed by white medical staff colleagues in France to be an African immigrant, he feels equally displaced when returning to his hereditary “homeland.”

Clear-eyed Kohler recognizes that his movie is, and couldn’t be anything other than, a view of Africa from an outsider European perspective. The roughly ‘Heart of Darkness’-like story structure is more a self-conscious acknowledgement of this limitation, rather than any kind of homage or attempt at genre exploitation.

At the heart of Ebbo’s crisis is the struggle to come to terms with the fact that, even after 20 years in the bush, as a white European he will always be an outsider in Africa. Will he accept this truth, or escape into denial? Meanwhile, will Alex give a full report of what he finds, or find a reason to lie? And what exactly is Ebbo up to when he takes Alex on a midnight hunt?

The hunt scenes shot at night in the jungle, by moonlight or no light at all, are especially effective: Kohler and Orth achieve a deep black, night-for-night image that only ultra-sensitive digital video cameras (they shot on the RED; say what you will about its detriments, or the inadequacies of DV in general) could likely obtain. They engulf their characters in a thick, teeming darkness, their temporary helplessness and disorientation magnifying a larger and more permanent disconnect.

Reviewed on October 16th at the 2011 New York Film Festival.

Rating 3.5 stars