CANT SLEEP I Movie Review

J'Ai Pas Sommeil

In the back alleys of Paris, a number of seemingly disparate story fragments simultaneously spin into motion during the course of a summer. An actress arrives from Lithuania, looking for a job; a series of murders is taking place in which the victims are all elderly women; a West Indian musician is imploring his wife to move back to Martinique with him. Not all of the loose ends of Claire Denis's I Can't Sleep are neatly tied up by the film's end (you may not even be sure what some of the ends are), but her film is less a whodunit than a gently poetic mood piece about uncertainty and angst at a particular moment in contemporary European history. There's a dreamlike mood about the whole enterprise that is effectively unnerving, though you're never sure exactly where it comes from. You may tell yourself afterwards that nothing much really happened in this film, yet you can't easily shake off its dank mood or its creeping sense of dread. If that's what Denis was after, she hit the bull's eye. (The killings alluded to in I Can't Sleep are drawn from an actual case of a decade ago.)

NEXT STOP… Chocolat, Nenette et Boni, A Single Girl

1993 110m/C FR Richard Courcet, Vincent Dupont, Katerina Golubeva, Alex Descas, Beatrice Dalle, Laurent Grevill; D: Claire Denis; W: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau; C: Agnes Godard; M: Jean Murat. VHS NYF