I Can’t Sleep (1994) – DVD

J'ai pas sommeil
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Katerina Golubeva, Richard Courcet, Vincent Dupont, Laurent Grevill
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Claire Denis thinks the world is a lot like Paris–which is to say, a morally bankrupt no-man's land that chews you up and spits you out. Nobody seems to know how to get by in Denis's fifth feature, I Can't Sleep: not Daiga (Katerina Golubeva), the young refugee from a perestroika-ravaged Lithuania looking for a new chance; not Theo (Alex Descas), the put-upon furniture deliveryman who's been taken advantage of once too often; and certainly not the old ladies victimized by a ruthless serial killer. Apparently, anything goes in Paris, standing in for the corrupt void faced after the fall of some once-eternal verities, and everything is up for grabs for the ideological clean-slate capable of seeing the odds. The only one enjoying himself at all is Theo's brother, Camille (Richard Courcet). Did I mention that he's the killer?

I Can't Sleep finds us in one of those Gramscian times where the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. Old World absolutism has expired along with the Soviet dream, but nothing stands by to fill their place(s)–and so Paris, with its mélange of fugitive ethnicities and capitalist opportunism, is suddenly a great metaphor for the big "what happened?" experienced by the dogmatically deprived rest of the world. Like Daiga, an aspiring actress lured to the city with empty promises of a career in theatre, they find themselves left at the altar. But, having no choice but to move with the current, they are unable to extricate themselves–thus the white wife (Béatrice Dalle) of Martinique-born Theo is naturally disturbed when he suggests that they quit France for his lost homeland. These two are in whether they like it or not, and there's no getting out.

The only people who get ahead throw off sentimental attachments and go with the flow. Hence Camille: he's learned from the more casual abuses of the city's citizenry that the freedom from ideology is the freedom to exploit. His "granny-killer" uses the same logic by which a businessman outsources workers to India or makes a killing in post-communist Eastern Europe, taking advantage of the weak for selfish profit. Identified with the new world order, Camille has taken it to its logical conclusion of murder–his concurrence with the hapless virtue of Daiga and Theo is everything you need to know about the line between mastery and victimization in the post-everything landscape. The Godardian question becomes: between grief and murder, what?

Movies have become so intellectually depleted that it's hard to know what to do with all the stuff that I Can't Sleep throws at you. The Robert Altmans and Paul Thomas Andersons of the world promise the swirl of linked but disparate individuals, but Denis maps out what those directors leave blank: the governing forces responsible for the very misery of all those romantically unhappy people. Denis has no time for pseudo-poetic niceties, cutting through them with sly humour and a total lack of mawkishness that's refreshing in a world susceptible to the "emotions" of Amélie. Mean people suck just as much in her world as in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's, yet she's smart enough to show why and how they suck–and that it takes more than a brown-eyed gamine to clean up the mess.

THE DVD
Though Wellspring's DVD release of I Can't Sleep is a clear improvement on New Yorker's old, bleary VHS transfer, it's not without its faults. PAL conversion issues inhibit definition, while colours, despite strong saturation, can look even more washed-out than the limited palette requires. The Dolby 5.1 audio meanwhile confines its surround features to room tone and street noise; you can switch it over from the default 2.0, but really, why bother? Extras are limited to filmographies for Denis, Golubeva, Descas, Courcet, and Dalle, as well as a Wellspring weblink, an offer from the Artfilm Collection, and trailers for Humanité, Pola X, Strayed, Twentynine Palms, and Denis's own Friday Night.

110 minutes; NR; 1.66:1 (16×9-enhanced); French DD 5.1, French DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Wellspring