I Can't Sleep (1994) User Reviews (14)

Indifference Amid Chaos

[Oblomov_81 · 8/10 · 3 February 2003]

Claire Denis' "I Can't Sleep" is a puzzling movie, one that is difficult to grasp because its simplicity makes it so daunting. The story is actually a study of an individual's ability to go about his or her everyday life while terror permeates the surroundings. The central character is Daiga, a Lithuanian woman who has moved to Paris and is looking for a job. As she moves about the city, she gradually begins to notice how the citizens are reacting to a string of murders that has been hyped up in the media; they do not express their fears outwardly, but instead seem a little detached and edgy. As she becomes settled, she begins to meet a few interesting people; they include a considerate landlady, a struggling musician, and two homosexuals who just happen to be the killers.

Denis takes a tricky approach to portraying the murderers. She does not condone their actions and clearly does not have too much sympathy for them, but still manages to depict them as ordinary human beings who are driven to desperate crimes because they fail to relate to anything in their environment. She does this by first showing the effect their actions have on the rest of the city, with the newspapers blaring sensational headlines and the citizens reacting by retreating into their homes. But, as the story unfolds, the killers are placed on the same plane as the rest of the characters, and we see their problems, insecurities, and apathy fit in with the day-to-day tedium of their lives. They do not have anyone else to care about, and spend their evenings wandering about the various below-level dives and nightclubs in Paris. It is not until later on that we learn these two men are actually the killers. And when we do discover this, it makes sense in a strange sort of way: their alienation from the rest of society has made them indifferent to everyone but each other. It's almost as if they killed not out of anger, hate, or insanity, but out of boredom.

Denis also makes it clear that such crimes have consequences not just for the victims, but for all of society. In the end, it is Daiga, the immigrant who has maintained indifference to the slayings throughout most of the film, who is forced to decide how to expose the criminals. Her `outsider' status gradually diminishes as she realizes that she is the only person who can change the course of events.

Still, the drama to the story is not as involving as it could be, and the characters' different stories are not always well balanced. Nevertheless, "I Can't Sleep" is still an intriguing tale about how people often remain indifferent to brutality until it affects them personally.

A Denis film that holds your attention

[bob998 · 8/10 · 25 February 2011]

J'ai pas sommeil gets off to a shaky start, with laughing cops and bland-faced Katerina Golubeva driving her rattle-trap Soviet car around Paris, but soon settles down to an absorbing study of greed and murder. Most of the characters are expatriates, some from eastern Europe, some from Martinique, and all are caught up in the search for happiness in a difficult environment (Paris can be hell for outsiders, as Balzac and many other artists have told us).

At first you aren't aware that it's a murder story: you don't see a woman being strangled and robbed until 64 minutes have elapsed, but Denis holds our attention with atmospheric scenes of the gay sub-culture that Camille moves in. She brings out the voluptuous, narcissistic aspects of this world very well. The performances are all good. Richard Courcet as Camille has little to say, but his body speaks eloquently. Alex Descas and Beatrice Dalle are veterans of Denis's films and are effective as the couple with a child. Theo delivers furniture by day and plays violin in a band at night; he wants to go back to his native Martinique but Mona isn't at all sure about this. Line Renaud does a great job as Ninon, the hotel manager who lovingly deals with all these star-crossed souls. I had to go to YouTube after the credits to hear Line sing Ma cabane au Canada and Frou-Frou... she is wonderful.

A Strange Tale

[harry-76 · 6/10 · 15 April 1999]

Writer-Director Claire Denis is telling a pretty strange tale in her "J'ai pas sommeil." Reportedly inspired by real-life news events, the focus is on an unsavory series of murders in a large French city, and various people somehow related to these happenings. These folks do not all know one another or even, in some cases, come in contact with each other. More strangely, Denis incorporates a few people who don't seem to be related to the events at all. The film's structure is free form, and various scenes are deliberately presented in a disjunct manner. There is some interest generated in trying to figure out what's going on, and in fact, there are a couple of coldly frightening scenes of calculated murder. I found myself not being attracted to nor empathizing with any of these characters. I merely observed with some interest. The general viewer response will depend on personal preferences. All in all, I found this ultimately to be a very slightly above average film work.

In-depth character focus

[marcyjorgensen · 11 May 2002]

I enjoyed this film that had beautiful images of the male body, and a colorful mix of characters. Although the director, Claire Denis is a straight, white, woman, the film is full of homosexuality images. These images are done artfully however, do not limit the films appeal to a wide range of people. Although a serial killer is loose in Paris, this film is not a classic thriller, in the sense that the viewer does not feel on-edge, and actually might feel comfortable with the killer as did I. I would recommend this film as a good peek at what it is like to be an outsider in Paris.

Dreaming Of Insomnia

[writers_reign · 7/10 · 10 October 2005]

This time around Claire Denis is exploring the area later exploited in Dirty Pretty Things, namely immigrant subculture in a large city (London and Paris respectively). It's loosely constructed at best and if it has a centre that centre is a fictionalised version of 20 real murders that occurred in Paris in the 80s. Newly arrived Lithuanian Daiga (Katerina Golubeva, recently seen boffing her brains out in Twentynine Palms) serves as a link of sorts between Mona (Beatrice Dalle) and her on-off relationship with an African musician, Alex Descas whose ambition in life is to return to Martinique with Mona and their baby and live off sunshine and fish and his brother Camille (Richard Courcet) a drag queen who, with his white lover, is in fact responsible for the murders. Line Renaud is also on hand to remind us of how the old school used to do it and very welcome she is. At times this resembles an Otar Iosselliani project if Iosselliani were featuring cameos by the likes of Catherine Frot. Watchable without being memorable.

let me explain

[bruxe · 10/10 · 29 June 2005]

This film is a fictional portrayal based on the true story of Thierry Paulin, who with the help of his lover murdered twenty or so elderly women in the Montmartre area of Paris, during the eighties. He was known as the "granny killer." What I think confused the viewer who commented before me was the following: The United States has created a crime genre in which the detectives are heroes and the murderers are detestable yet mysterious. In a way, the pleasure in these films comes from watching the murderer act out our unconscious aggressions without our having to admit any identification with him. Claire Denis tried for a truer, more sociological portrait of the situation. She attempted to show the murderer's daily life and interactions with his community in a fashion that proved that, in some ways, he was no different than any other human being. There are no heroes or villains in this film, just a group of immigrants interwoven by the forces of urban life, and one of them happens to be a murderer. The film is a demystification of the "noir" genre. Since people are so used to seeing crime portrayed according to the usual formula, this film can be confusing at first glance. But the achievement of this film is monumental because it manages to draw us into the intimate life of a murderer without hyperbole and without demonizing him. It abandons the sensationalism created by the media to bring us face to face with a real situation.

A small miracle of filmmaking

[lwong · 10/10 · 4 August 1999]

"I Can't Sleep" opens with a shot of policemen laughing in a helicopter above Paris, a scene Denis says has no narrative function. The helicopter doesn't blow up or crash (as we half-expect, so Hollywood-trained we have become). We never learn why they are laughing, and it never comes up. but it immediately sets a tone of ordinariness about something that is so freighted with allusion - that police work is all dark violence and angst and frayed tension. Police work also includes ordinary moments between two people.

"I Can't Sleep" follows three sets of characters who come to be loosely linked. First is Daïga (Katerina Golubeva, an unknown with an exotic resemblance to Michelle Pfeiffer) who drives away from Lithuania and into the Paris ring in her boxy, smoking car. She has only vague ideas about what she wants other than to let Paris wash over her life. for the time being, she finds a tenuous niche in the émigré community working indifferently as a maid in a second rate hotel. Among the hotel's residents is Camille (another unknown, Richard Courcet as a drag hoodlum with a brooding boredom) who, with his friends and lovers, leads us through the gay subculture. And there is Theo, Camille's good brother who struggles the struggle of the unFrench emigrant class in neoconservative France. As we stay with these characters, we see a Paris that isn't a backdrop to romantic comedies like "Forget Paris" or "French Kiss." In the course of "I Can't Sleep" we get a sense of the shape of some of the other kinds of lives that are lived in Paris. We begin to move to the film's rhythm. At intervals are arresting set pieces that attenuate reaction. These subtle departures don't break the film's basic form, but they do break the mood of the expected. We get to laugh and be aware that we are laughing. We marvel at small things and know we are marvelling at them.

In "I Can't Sleep," newspaper headlines scream about a sociopath who is going around murdering and robbing solitary old women (based on a true case). Denis illustrates for us what we know to be true - that mostly people are unaffected. Everyone's lives continue to be lived routinely, each with their own personal life traumas that fill their days. By chance, the murders intersect our characters' lives and we see their reactions to it. There aren't any obvious cues for us. We watch Daïga as she learns who the murderer is. What she does and what happens as a result is less important than the almost wordless scene they share when she follows him. Something essential passes between them, but what that is is up to you. It's as much based on the experience you can bring to it and what abstractions you can add to the moment. Likewise, Theo's face is a dispassionate mask - it begs us on to project our reactions to his life circumstances.

This is a tenuous connection, a lot for Denis to ask of her audience, and it may not engage many or even most of those sitting out there. In a way, you have to have a ready state of mind to watch it. It reminds me most of Kryzysztof Kieslowski's "Red" and the conversations I had about it. More than a few friends said they couldn't suspend their qualms about the believability of the relationship between Jean-Louis Trintignant's character and Irene Jacob's. It was too far from convention (age difference) and lacked a believable basis (he was just a weird old guy, and what did they share anyway?). But for me, I loved it because his character seemed the tragic sum of all the characters I have seen Trintignant play (especially in "A Man and A Woman," "Z," "The Conformist" among others). Here was the same good man, now ruined at an advanced age, and I was meeting him again. I felt I understood him fundamentally, knew what he had gone through to reach this sour moment in his life and because of this, it was easy for me to project my understanding onto Jacob's character. I thought, "Of course she loves him."

Anyway, "I Can't Sleep" is, at its best moments, a collage of sometime odd elements that is somehow perfectly composed (like in "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire," and in Kieslowski, especially, "Red" and some of the Dekalog episodes like "Thou shalt not bear false witness"). One can't explain why it seems right, but everyting certainly does feel just right - the film is conjured from single notes that together comprise a whole score. There is what seems like extraneous stuff in there. You wonder how it fits, what it really means. Yet, it nevertheless feels right once the whole has been digested.

Did anyone of you understand it?

[walrus-5 · 5/10 · 3 March 1999]

This is a very strange film, indeed. In the plot there's something about a Latvian immigrant in Paris, a couple of homosexuals, an old lady's murderer, some African immigrants (I think they're from the Maurice Islands), a woman who is a hotel manager and protects the young Latvian, a transvestite who has his own show on a nightclub, and some other crimes and weird stuff.

But it's not a bad movie after all. Despite the confusing plot, the film has some very nice sequences, some shocking scenes and one of the most beautiful actresses I've ever seen, Ms. Katherina Golubeva, whom I'd never heard about before this film. If you have a lot of time to spend, and you're in the mood for an unusual motion picture with a gorgeous young actress, "J'Ai pas Sommeil" is a good pick.

Le demimonde of Paris made up of uprooted souls and outcasts

[cesar-52 · 10/10 · 22 December 2006]

You might have to be a foreigner to understand the plight of not belonging to the main culture of a country. The characters portrayed are deracine from their native countries, attracted by the promised land of capitalism, functioning mainly in the twilight hours of Paris, where they are mainly prey for sexual predators. Exploitation of these immigrants continue as it was in colonial times, except this time is not so overt. The illusion of freedom is thin. The impossibility of communication thick. Interacial affairs doomed, as are their children. Pretty bleak, but portrayed with sensitivity by Denis who shows us the underside and post effects of colonialism in contemporary Paris.

Extended focus on nasty characters

[vyto34 · 2/10 · 29 December 2003]

Not a pretty picture. Glamorizes a gay black thug and his white accomplice. Pointless overall, although Yekaterina Golubeva is quite pretty and Line Renaud is a very charming grandmother-type. The few sparks produced these by two are just way outnumbered by the nasty stuff. Denis' fame does not make this into a good movie.

as many exits as entrances

[sandover · 9 June 2009]

If you want to construe it, this is a maybe difficult film: it definitely is not about gay lady killers,as some want to have it that way. The film juggles at least three stories at once, without any of them being actually central.

Yet the, let's say, narrative device is simple as life, as we come to realize at the end. A mysterious young woman, a Lithuanian émigré to Paris, is our entrance and exit to the film, without any of the mystery altered, just enhanced, and peppered by a grim political bottom-line:no one can be central when "you can't sleep" in the metropolitan modern heyday. Even crimes are not, in a -frightening- way, central.

The young woman, wanders her life in Paris, exposed to an alien culture (portrayed actually as a semi-culture), going into male-only cinemas to have a laugh (and it is in such scenes that the director seems to lure us into allegorical viewings), meandering in and out of a working milieu while we're not sure that anything touches her, except her car-to-car assault to a director(?)in the street, who slimly proposed to her (a date) after having just rejected her (for the job). And I think yes, she does not care as we see her come in and out of the screen, having worked as a cleaning-lady in a second rate hotel, and consciously robbed one of the residents, a killer. What can one make out of such a character? The film is structured by glimpses and a long traveling of redemption towards the end - so what can our gaze make out of it? Are we witnesses, peeping toms, idle passersby, outlaw onlookers? I would trust in the films suave experimentalism who is not afraid of juggling many elements and somehow does not bother with scenes who would be clean-cut with, or without, narrative function. The film is its own happy dream and insomnia, if there ever was one.

Simple as life I said? It is like taking straightforwardly the confession that happens round midway in the film about Martinique being ideal for a nonchalant living, picking fruit from the trees, swimming and fishing all the time and all that. It is the ironies in the film that are hard-boiled and realistic.

It seems appropriate to me that the film begins with the Law having one hell of a laugh, in a slightly Hitchckockian scene (as the one in Birds with the legendary God's eye view), yet the from-above does not quite work, for we just get a blurred by the clouds image of Paris.

All in all, it is a film worthy of repeated screenings for, as the poet says, "you suddenly spoke out of the margin".

find those of your reality

[lee_eisenberg · 8/10 · 2 April 2023]

A movie genre that I've occasionally seen focuses on the gritty underbelly of supposedly idealistic places. Claire Denis's "J'ai pas sommeil" ("I Can't Sleep" in English) is one such movie. The protagonists are a group of in a dismal section of Paris who find each other amid a murder spree. This group includes a man from Martinique (a reminder of France's colonial history) and a woman from Lithuania (one of the many people who saw no prospects in their countries once the Eastern Bloc collapsed).

Quite a different image of France than we're used to, but this group of people still has it better than most people in the global south. The point is that millions if not billions of people worldwide live in these conditions. The people depicted in this movie could just as easily be people from Latin America seeking a better life in the US.

Basically, if you're reading this, then you're one of the privileged few. Definitely check out the movie.

Paralyzingly inert

[gridoon2024 · 3/10 · 30 May 2023]

I can sort of see what (co)writer - director Claire Denis was trying to do here: a serial killer "thriller" minus any of the Hollywood flash, cross-pollinated with a "slice-of-Parisian-life" type of film (there is also a bit of "Pulp Fiction" going on, not in the chronology of events which is straightforward but in the way various characters pop in and out of each others' stories; however, because both films came out at the same year (1994), it's hard to say if there was any actual influence). Unfortunately, the result is boring, meandering and interminable. The Lithuanian girl's sections are marginally more interesting than the rest, mostly because Yekaterina Golubeva is stunningly beautiful. Gotta love that totally inaccurate IMDb plot description! * out of 4.

evolution or destruction?

[ANCHINN · 25 May 2008]

By using any traffic system, you can go anytime, anywhere, anyway you like. This is called evolution. But in other way, that means you may surrounded by many strangers easily no matter what. No consideration if you like it or not. I call it destruction of human relations.

You can't deny thinking about it seeing this film. Cos it has scenes full of it. Distance between people, emptiness of the civilization.

We have to be separated cos they wanted us that way. So they can easily control. We've been cut out from our own lives and pasted on a huge system just to run it.

Not enough lines, but silence speaks. I like these kind of smart film. Hail Ozu.