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Powerful

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

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.

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".

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.

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.