In one striking scene Bagiński walks through a traffic jam, where drivers stand frozen next to their cars, all looking towards the opposite direction. While characters seem to perform in literally every scene of the film, a great amount of honesty and sincerity can be traced in their filmic confessions and exposure. All These Sleepless Nights feels too intimate and contrived to be a documentary, but also too spontaneous and immediate to be purely fiction. So, what do we make of a film like All These Sleepless Nights in terms of its epistemological status? It certainly belongs to one of the most striking developments in recent documentary cinema, the emergence of observational hybrids that blur or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, staking out instead a territory in between real facts and fabricated fiction. There is very little natural sound, no use of boom mics to support the hand-held aesthetics, and the dialogue is entirely re-recorded to grant the film a dream-like quality.
The ecstatic and hypnotic soundtrack, embellished extensively with house and techno music, does not so much attest to a lived experience, but rather simulates a liminal zone between document and fiction. While Marczak is interested in observing, he gives little respect to sound synchronicity, the traditional hallmark of similar documentary strategies for the past few decades. Eventually, one-night stands and evanescent all-night parties lead to loneliness and boredom. The characters are seemingly indifferent to the camera’s presence, roaming the streets aimlessly, invading other people’s backyards, and crashing parties to which they are not invited. It never stops swinging and swirling around Krzysztof, Michal, and Eva, caring less about destinations and more about wandering. Marczak, who engineered a special lightweight rig so he could move freely with his subjects, strives to be in sync with his characters, adjusting the camera to their pace and movements until it feels like the camera becomes another participant. His camera becomes endlessly curious about his subjects, lusting, as they do, for some unreachable satisfaction, observing their latent wish to interact. Marczak, however, is not really interested in exploring the inevitable jealousy or betrayal of friendship, even if those are natural outcomes of such a millennial ménage à trois.
#Sundance 2016 all these sleepless nights movie#
On the other hand, they are performing as themselves without pretending to be anyone else, so nothing is simulated or dictated for them in advance.Įarly in the movie, in the midst of this nihilistic and careless lifestyle, Michal introduces his ex-girlfriend Eva to Krysztof, and what happens next is the closest the movie will ever get to a narrative thread. On the one hand, Marczak decides to capture the hedonistic experience of Bagiński and Huszcza without offering us much context or background information as a result, both men stand for a new generation born in Poland after the end of communism, roaming freely around a flourishing city at a very specific moment in time. Yet one wonders: is this the voice of a new millennial generation in Warsaw circa 2015, or do the two young men play no one but themselves? Such unresolved confusion is crucial to the film’s strategy of hybridity. He documented them with a poetic intimacy, reminiscent at times of a Terrence Malick film, as they flirted around in house parties, danced the night away in rave concerts, and took early walks during sunrise. Not interested in big social questions or political issues, Marczak cut down his film from around a year of footage from the life of its two main characters, Krzysztof Bagiński and Michal Huszcza. Focusing on two young men in their early twenties as they roam the streets of Warsaw to search for fleeting moments of love and excitement, All These Sleepless Nights becomes an experiential study of youth, with all the weird feelings and strong emotions attached to it. On the other hand, here is a movie that makes a point about the value of going nowhere, and transcends the boundaries of conventional documentary while getting there. Michał Marczak’s All These Sleepless Nights (2016) is one of those films that feels so fresh, unique, and original, that to tag it with the often-used catchphrase “docufiction” may essentially lead us nowhere. “Dazed and Confused” Ohad Landesman (Tel Aviv University)
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