All These Sleepless Nights (2016, Dir. Michal Marczak):
“It’s so easy to heighten emotions and add story points and beats to make the story more dramaturgically interesting. But then you’re getting away from the reality of the emotions and feelings… I knew that I wanted a story that doesn’t revolve around very big problems.”
— Michal Marczak
“So much was supposed to happen and nothing happened.” So says a character in All These Sleepless Nights and so goes the film, to its credit and detriment. We begin with New Year fireworks blooming over Warsaw, as high-strung twentysomething Krzysztof (Krzysztof Baginski) prepares to break up with yet another girlfriend. If you combine all your best moments in life, he muses to himself, you would get something resembling a four day-long fireworks display. Aha, you might think: a coming-of-age tale, given narrative shape by the protagonist’s inner dialogue.
You’d be half-right. All These Sleepless Nights is a character study, all right, but it’s also a half-documentary shot on the fly, a work that stubbornly avoids engaging narrative at nearly every turn, and apart from that opening narration, lacking in self-consciousness. Wishing to capture modern-day Polish youth in their energy and aimlessness, director Michal Marczak assembled neophyte actors, let his camera roll over the course of a year and a half, and let the chips fall where they may (with a few tweaks in the name of plot, but only as needed). “I wonder whose life this is supposed to be,” Krzysztof ponders. In this film that skirts the boundaries between fiction and documentary, his life is any faceless young person’s existence: an endless parade of raves, philosophical bull sessions in bathrooms, a succession of friends and women floating in and out of one’s social sphere, an overriding sense of confusion and dissatisfaction greeting you with each morning’s hangover. A chummy foreigner friend says to Krzysztof at one point: “Stop thinking so much.” Fat chance. The sole constant in Krzysztof’s life is his buddy Michal (Michal Huszcza) — in addition to sharing the director’s first name, is he his alter ego? Difficult to say, since his only defining characteristics are his unusual self-possession and his big house, complete with garden. All These Sleepless Nights has little use for vagaries such as occupations or character histories; relationships are boiled down to who you bump into at a party, whether you end up under the sheets together, and how long they remain in your orbit. At first, the movie seems content to merely observe Krzysztof and Michal as they stumble through their blissed-out, fucked-up misadventures. Something with potential consequences might threaten to happen every so often, as when Krzysztof skips across the hoods of parked police cars, setting off their alarms, or he and his latest one-night stand stagger drunkenly into traffic, but Marczak is resolute in not giving in to easy drama. His camera constantly sidling up to his young protagonists like the third person in a conversation, even as it bobs with boozy bravado, he does an impressive job wringing some striking images out of Warsaw’s bullet-gray cityscapes. This may be a cold Eastern bloc town, but around every corner are neon lights, the flash of strobes, the rapturous sight of rainwater dashing down steps. Likewise, the soundtrack is a constant thrum of activity, as house music jockeys for position with folk songs, traffic, and even wind and birds, like that niggling buzz that won’t go away
Despite itself, a plot does emerge from the hurlyburly with the arrival of willowy Eva (Eva Lebuef), Michal’s ex-girlfriend. Worldly and assured, she takes an immediate shine to Krzysztof, the two of them embarking on a bittersweet affair that threatens the friendship between the two male besties. For a brief while the proceedings gain some emotional heft, and the random details that Marczak’s camera captures are placed at the service of story. The exchanging of cigarettes evolves from flirtation to full-blown devotion. A goofy hip-hop dance lesson in the park is one of the film’s few moments of joyous, no-strings-attached release. Disney-fied notions of romance are gently mocked and then celebrated when Eva sings a Polish translation of “Colors of the Wind.” At first glance, All These Sleepless Nights would seem to be the antithesis to Poland’s most famous cinematic export, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and his moral tales, but as the fallout of the other Krzysztof’s affair leads to self-recrimination, a return to raves and the “anthill of vanity,” and increasingly debauched diversions, one can sense the rush of epiphany approaching our young protagonist.
Only it doesn’t, not really. Marczak is expert at capturing a mood and a milieu; he’s less successful at synthesizing a thoughtful, original statement about what we’re seeing. Every time we seem to be headed somewhere, we beat a retreat to another party, another vacant stare out of an apartment window, another copious intake of drugs. Of course this is part of the point, and Krzysztof admits as much as the film heads down the home stretch: Over a year of open-ended relationships and revelry, and what was the outcome of it all? Instead of using that question as the springboard for a payoff, the film putters to a close with a few curious vignettes which are amusing in of themselves — Krzysztof equipped with pink bunny costume and portable PA system, trying to make connections with passersby in the park, or a rave party in which all the participants hear the music through headphones — but seem to hang untethered, islands of incident marooned at sea. “What can we do? Battle on!” Eva says at one point, and while Marczak gives us a fitfully engrossing war report from the front lines of young urban Warsaw, his approach is ultimately (and sadly) closer to his character Michal’s diffident observation: “I think I’m good, but I don’t know, and I don’t think about it much.” All These Sleepless Nights, like Krzysztof dancing his way alone down the street (in what is the film’s presiding image), can intoxicate in the moment, but in the end we’re left bemused, wondering where we came from, and where we’re going to.
