J'ai pas sommeil

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.