I Can't Sleep | Claire Denis, 1994
It opens in the sky. A close-up of a police officer piloting a helicopter, camera pointed down past the controls towards the ground below. The two men, pilot and co-pilot, laugh irrepressibly at nothing in particular as a cut reveals the chopper’s position above a motorway. Cars stream past below, oblivious to the jokes overhead. Denis cuts down through the clouds to road level, and so the film begins. A film of vertical movement, of staircases and elevators, but also of traffic, where all roads are dead ends and the continuous present is all that there is. People live alone in hotels or leased apartments, cramped and congested, where all space is communal: beds in dining rooms, shared showers, thin walls. Paris looks beautiful from the roof of a high-rise but the view doesn’t exist on the street. Dreams don’t always pan out. The future is so far away. An actress is lured to France under false pretences and abandoned, a musician plans a new life in Martinique for his family while his reluctant wife fights to keep their son with her in Paris, and an unemployed model and drag queen drifts around the city with his boyfriend and lives on money borrowed from his brother. Everyone is waiting and nothing is happening. There’s no place for stagnation in Paris. Meanwhile, the spectre of a serial killer looms large over the city but nobody seems to care.
And it ends as it begins. A man leaves a police station and starts to walk. Denis places this man in the centre of the frame, but there really is nowhere else he could be. To his left, the outer wall of the precinct, flanked by two officers who watch him with suspicion as he passes; and to his right, a chained barrier separating the length of the pavement from a busy road with a “no stopping” sign. A sense of freedom, then, but one beset by restrictions. A final punch line from the skies above.