I Can't Sleep

I Can't Sleep is an eerie, edgy slice of contemporary French life, seen as though through a cracked window. A protegé of both Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, director Denis (Chocolat) earns high marks for originality in this tale of love and death amongst some nighttime denizens of Paris. Daiga (Golubeva) is a gorgeous Lithuanian woman who arrives in Paris without a penny to her name in search of a job acting. Raphäel (Dupont) is an expatriate black man from the Antilles who longs to return home with his young daughter and his shrewish wife. His brother Camille (Courcet) is a gay transvestite who haunts the darkened streets of Paris, vogueing in nightclubs and hanging out with his white lover. Although each character comes from a decidedly different set of circumstances and is pursuing different goals, all three will come into contact with each other and change each other's lives forever. Denis' Paris is shaken by a series of brutal murders committed against elderly women, much like the Thierry Paulin case of the late Eighties. Viewers familiar with that sensationalistic case will know what's going on here before the rest of the audience, but that doesn't detract from Denis' lyrical, haunting film. And while I Can't Sleep may take a while to get going, fussing as it does over the seemingly trivial and mundane, once the film gets up to speed and the characters' relationships become clear, it moves like a bullet towards its inescapable, uncompromising finale. Denis, it seems, has taken much away from her experiences working with Wenders and Jarmusch. Many of their signature techniques pop up from time to time, but the film remains the wholly original work of Denis. Creepy in a very post-modern way, it's a Godard film without Godard: eerie, touching, and fraught with meaning.