In some moments it feels right out of the ’60s, a vibe perhaps more akin to strung out Fellini than the French New Wave. Marczak follows them through real parties, meandering among a city of dancing extras. The documentary element comes from the world around them. The question of acting leads into inevitably the most interesting question raised by All These Sleepless Nights: In which ways is it nonfiction? Most of the Kris and Michal narrative seems pretty evidently scripted, if perhaps loosely. It’s a gesture of self-awareness without any real cinematic or narrative evidence behind it. Yet there’s nothing transformational about the character arc of either Kris or his partner in party. At one point Kris’s voiceover suggests that we are all constantly acting, making “more spectacular versions” of ourselves. ![]() They look a bit like Mormon missionaries and seem to be equally unaware of their own inchoate homoeroticism. For example, Kris and Michal almost exclusively wear white, a uniform of sorts for the always-twilight world that Marczak has placed them in. Yet there’s nothing similarly queer or wry about this particular landscape, let alone self-aware. All These Sleepless Nights is principally an exercise in style, as if the bored aristocrats of 19th-century literature found themselves in Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats. This resistance to narrative is not tiresome so much as it is underdeveloped. Sometimes he slips a melancholy thought into Kris’s frequent voiceover. Sometimes, though not too often, he gestures toward the newness of this generation in a country where this lifestyle would not have been conceivable before their birth. All These Sleepless Nights follows youthful Polish bons vivants Kris and Michal as they meander through an endless party landscape, briefly encountering a love triangle midway through the film that Marczak seems to find no more interesting than any of the mostly plotless raves that come before and after. To his credit, director Michal Marczak ( Fuck for Forest) doesn’t seem entirely oblivious to this frustrating ambiguity that colors his newest feature. Yet it’s unclear whether such a film is really about being young, or whether it’s actually just about being rich. The business of having nothing to do is often a lovely one. Even in high budget films I feel like the crowd in the background is fake and they aren’t dancing to the actual music, or people are pretending to be drunk, so I really wanted that authenticity of Warsaw and I knew I couldn’t do anything that would distract or interfere with the mode and atmosphere I wanted to capture.All These Sleepless Nights is a film about beautiful, young people with no financial concerns and nothing to do but gaze into each others’ eyes, take club drugs, and wonder at the perpetual twilight of their unscheduled lives. When I knew I wanted to do this I knew there wasn’t enough really good young actors that had that new vibe to them, or that represented the style of how I wanted to tell the story, so I knew I would have to work with non-actors or people off the streets, because that’s where the energy is. That was the idea of the structure of the film was to make a movie of moments where the audience has to connect the dots. ![]() All those crazy and random things that happened, I’m only now making sense of it. ![]() ![]() That’s how I felt when I got into my 30s. I really wanted to make a film about youth and all those crazy emotions associated with it and the fragmentary nature of it and how once you are past that period in your life you have to look back and make your own narrative about it.
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