With its darkly rich and nocturnal color palate, and its incorporation of Tokyo's most spectral man-made monoliths, the remarkable and shockingly immersive "Call For Dreams" is a rare sensory mindscape in which the lines between the conscious and unconscious are very intentionally and disruptively obliterated. This isn't so much a traditional three-act film as it is a visually and sonically-induced psychological attack of the most subversive and surrealist kind, and one that probably should be accompanied by a warning label -- it's no hyperbole to state that allowing one's self to become enveloped in "Call For Dreams" plays on the head in a way that takes a full day to shake as we reacclimate to life's more grounded, pedestrian normalcies.
Eko (Mami Shimazaki) is a creature of the night. Her downtown Tokyo is one in which the blacks collide with radiating neons soaked by relentless assaults of rain. On one darkly glowing evening, Eko rings up a Tokyo newspaper to place a vague yet alluring ad: "Call For Dreams" is its enticing directive. Soon, Tokyo's dream-afflicted are leaving messages on her tape-based answering machine in which they recount their recurring nightscapes. Eko's provided service is dream reenactment: Like a call girl minus the provision of sex, she travels by scooter to appointments. At one location, a man has repeatedly dreamed of shooting a woman with four bullets; elsewhere, a woman has dreamed herself as a passenger on a plane consumed by a visceral fog. Shimazaki quietly conjures an elite performance: Like a call girl, Eko is at once submissive -- a subject to the defined parameters of a given client's dream. Yet she's also commanding in her wordless leadership of their reenactments; a window through which her clients seek an awakened understanding of their own subconscious experiences. As we watch it all unfold, director Ran Slavin without clear announcement dissolves the sinewy connective tissue between wakened realities and the dream state itself. It's an insidious and shifting line that melts completely as Eko's reenactments submerge into the watercolors of a murder investigation in far-off Tel Aviv: The insinuation is that she's triggered some ethereal crossing of the threshold between the dreams she reenacts and our connected, consciously-lived world.
Very intentionally, Slavin avoids chiseled conclusions and the neat gift-wrapping of plot payouts in "Call For Dreams." Its ambition forbids it, as it aspires instead to install a portal between two states of consciousness, and with a door that swings both ways. This is a truly unique and aspirational film, drenched in gorgeous atmospherics, and it's ultimately one to be digested with careful intent. "Does the dreamer dream the dream, or does the dream dream the dreamer?" - (Was this review of use to you? If so, let me know by clicking "Helpful." Cheers!)
