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 kidnapped daughter, Bellflower. This takes place sometime in the fifties, 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 of riddles and exotic locales. It is a silent film world perfectly recreated by Kaizo Hayashi, a promising young director who was born in 1957, part of a generation of filmmakers who know the past only through movies. (Most audiences imagine that Hayashi is simply using silent film footage until it becomes quite obvious that he is not!) The search leads, appropriately, to the doorstep of M. Pathé and Co., where it seems the beauteous Bellflower is trapped in a 1915 serial of which she is the star. Must our hero enter "The Eternal Mystery" in order to end Bellflower's travails? 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 benshis, live off-screen commentators who were often bigger attractions than the films they accompanied.