I Cant Sleep (1993)

Editor's Note The Granny Killings that took place in France in the mid-1980s are the central plot in this sparse and abstract meditation on the unsettling rhythms and continual quest for security of urban life. Lithuanian immigrant Daiga arrives in Paris at the height of the serial killings, seeking refuge with a distant relative. Camille is an urban gay vagabond, secretly killing elderly ladies. His brother Theo aches to leave France for his homeland of Martinique, but his wife and child struggle against the move. This deconstructed thriller entwines seemingly unconnected stories to compose a slight yet unnerving portrait of contemporary malaise.

	Vincent Dupont
	Laurent Grevill
	Beatrice Dalle
	Katerina Golubeva
	Alex Descas
	Richard Courcet
	Claire Denis - Screenwriter
	Nelly Quettier - Editor
	Agnes Godard - Director of Photography
	Jean-Pol Fargeau - Screenwriter
	Claire Denis - Director

A group of unrelated characters converges in the Paris of the mid-1980s. Beautiful Daiga arrives at the end of her journey by car from Lithuania just as the city is in the grips of a frightening string of murders, casually perpetrated by Camille--a black gay drifter--and his white lover. Theo is a struggling immigrant father of a small child, fixated on returning to Martinique, perpetually struggling with his French wife, Mona. As these disparate yet surprisingly similar stories begin to mesh, Denis's unflinching eye, color-saturated urban cinematography, and glacial pacing create a sort of inverted thriller in which the real mysteries are the struggling inner lives of the protagonists, not the crimes being committed in the foreground. The wandering interactions of the characters, the indifferent violence of the murders, and the tensions echoing below the surface of every interaction and gesture combine to create an abstract yet relentless image of urban self-absorption and identities in flux. Film Comment
"...A rewarding exercise in slowly, meticulously, movingly tracing out an urban grid of human connection and alienation....Remarkable..." 11/01/1994 p.67-70