Sleeper

In Sleeper Woody Allen satirises seventies dystopianism whilst resurrecting the slapstick comedy of the silent era, if Interiors was Allen’s Bergman film, and Stardust Memories his Fellini film, then Sleeper could be thought of as his Buster Keaton film. After a hospital mishap puts health-food shop owner Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) in a coma, he wakes up 200 years later to find himself in a very different and not exactly brave new world. All women are frigid, all men are impotent, and everyone lives in a police state run by a mysterious leader who hasn’t been seen in months. But why? However, this is no dystopian sci-fi thriller, but one of Woody Allen’s funniest films as his mid-1970s New York values and mores keep colliding with the new 22nd-century reality. He disguises himself as a robot butler, encounters a drastically genetically modified chicken, investigates the mysteries of the Orgasmotron and is reprogrammed to make himself believe that he is really Miss America. Meanwhile rebel activist and terrible poet Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) tries to keep him focused, knowing that he is uniquely valuable to the cause thanks to his lack of a normally compulsory biometric identity.