All These Sleepless Nights takes place among people young enough to think that truth and love –or something like them – will emerge when people are drunk or stoned or dancing at parties. There’s a lot of aimless milling around at night – small groups of young people and sometimes big crowds. People dance spontaneously, and young men – I gotta say boys – talk about stuff like being true to themselves and finding girlfriends. They walk the streets late at night or very early in the morning; they play in the leaves tossed up by a leaf blower; they weave in and out of metal barriers on the street and make rude boy-gestures at passing cars. They climb a fence outside a mansion and play in the water from a hose.
One of the pair is trying to get over a romance that didn’t pan out. He laments a bit, but mostly just acts out. Director Michal Marczak keeps the camera close and moving, in a way that reminds you more often than you need to know that these guys are unsettled. They laugh a lot, but at comments or things that might leave everyone else out of the loop. Their world is hermetic, solipsistic – a world of people who don’t yet understand that other people really do exist.
Scenes jump from parties at dumps to an ocean beach to a riverside. The picture often feels like dream as it jumps from dawn to night to dusk and back again. The two boys wind up separately with girls, flirting with gamey, evasive conversations. And they talk earnestly – and at length – about what they’re looking for in life, who they are, and, of course, where they’re AT. It’s distressing that the film itself is no smarter or less self-absorbed than these characters.
One of the young men says that he’s always wanted a girl who could impress him, to make him feel the challenge to be great enough to deserve her. At first, it sounds almost heroic, but it’s not – he’s saying that no young woman he meets is good enough for him, and you realize it would be great if the young woman he’s with at the moment would just haul off and smack him. Instead, there’s a sequence of her undulating naked in front of him.
A good while ago, a colleague joked that most young male filmmakers really just wanted to film their girlfriends having orgasms. I thought the situation had changed, mostly because filmmakers then usually worked on their own and could do what they wanted, but now they’re film students in colleges that won’t let them use university equipment to film their girlfriends in that way. So there’s something depressingly retro about All These Sleepless Nights.
What the movie doesn’t honor is craft. It follows these two young men around a city with a jerky, off-target hand-held camera that moves in and out of close-ups, and circles when the characters stop to muse on things or dance. Noticeable camera work has its strengths, but there’s never a shot that offers any richness of perception or – heaven forbid – any hint of metaphor. The sense is that life keeps moving so inexorably that you can’t hold on to anything or get the chance to see what anything means.
All These Sleepless Nights seems incapable of a critique or exposé of emptiness, but it is a kind of monument to emptiness. The characters talk about themselves exclusively. No one mentions connection to a world outside themselves. There’s no talk of politics, global warming, NATO, Russia, organic vegetables, gluten, Polish government, religion, STDs, economics or even art. Nothing they say has roots—maybe that’s why all they do in these sleepless nights is wander, feeling superior to other people.
The cast members all play themselves, and the film has won some awards as documentary. That’s a stretch.
