An homage to the engaging illusionism of the silent screen, To Sleep so as to Dream is a tour-de-force of postmodernism in Japanese cinema. In this (almost) silent (quasi-) mystery, a neophyte sleuth is hired by an aging silent screen star to find her kidnaped daughter, Bellflower. This takes place sometime in the 1950s, but reality is in the mind of the beholder, in this case the actress, who quite literally lives in the past. The detective himself is straight out of the Japanese late silents, hat, sidekick and all, the trail of Bellflower an intricate movie maze that leads to the doorstep of M. Pathé and Co., where it seems the beauteous Bellflower is trapped in a 1915 serial. It is an exotic silent film world perfectly recreated. A self-reflexive work that explores the past, alive in the present, this film also features a performance by one of Japan's few surviving benshi.