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June 20, 2009
J'ai Pas Sommeil (1995)
I haven't seen Claire Denis' second feature, S'en fout la mort (as far as I can tell, it's only available on an out-of-print VHS) and so can't exactly trace her path from the stateliness of Chocolat to the warm messiness of I Can't Sleep, her first collaboration with Agnes Godard as cinematographer. And by messy I mean: the film is loose to the point of sloppiness. The lens often seems incapable of finding focus as the characters drift in and out of its handheld periphery - an imperfection, to be sure, but one begat of the camera's regard, which is considerate in a way that a more mannered approach would not have been.
That consideration is extended to Camille (Richard Courcet), the queer Raskolinkov in what is essentially a true crime story. Camille is based on Thierry Paulin, a drag queen who murdered 18 elderly women in the 80s before being arrested, confessing to his crimes and succumbing to AIDS prior to conviction. This context gives the film it's axis. Camille's intentions are opaque; perhaps he's simply evil (on the film's poster, he's literally portrayed as a devil), but all signs suggest otherwise, and Denis isn't after a theory so simple as that of a wolf in ewe's clothing. Rather, in lieu of direct hypothesis, she employs the contrasts afforded by the interconnected storylines - which all deal in one way or another with issues of personal and, especially, cultural assimilation. It's a theme that she'll return to, but I couldn't help but feel that the promise of this particular film was picked up and brought to greater fruition by Michael Haneke in Code Unknown (and, to a more refined but perhaps lesser extent, Cache). In a way, Camille is too easy a symbol for the disconnection that Denis is probing here. There are other things more haunting, more enigmatic. The look that Beatrice Dalle gives Alex Descas, for example, by way of looking straight into the lens. And the way he returns it later, but not to her.
A little fracture of the fourth wall. Those are the things that stick.
Posted by David Lowery at June 20, 2009 3:52 AM