![]() This is one of those films about that gilded-or arguably, accursed-period of youth during which events seem to zoom by in a headlong rush, although it may feel to the subjects of this experience that nothing is really happening at all. And yet something is happening all the time, and fairly frenetically for the most part-even though the frenzy often feels paradoxically like the numb stasis often associated with youthful hedonism, at least in movies. In some ways, All These Sleepless Nights feels like 100 minutes of waiting for something to happen: it’s probably just as well that we get only a year’s worth of Krzysiek’s life, and then just a compilation of the briefest highlights. ![]() At the start of the film, over an aerial view of Warsaw at night, the sky lit up by fireworks, Krzysiek (Krzysztof Baginski)-a single man in, presumably, his early twenties-tells us in voiceover about the theory that, if you ran together each of the different types of experience you had known in an entire life, then “you’d end up staring at fireworks for four days straight… Sex would take up seven months… 51 days of deciding what to wear… 700 days of waiting for something to happen.” The difference between Marczak’s form of memory and Ernaux’s is that, where hers covers instances from an entire life, All These Sleepless Nights crams together a host of similar experiences from just one year in its protagonist’s existence. There’s a similar phenomenon at work in Michal Marczak’s film All These Sleepless Nights which is, for the most part, an evocation of many sleepless nights-and a few restless days-all run together and becoming somehow barely distinguishable from each other. All those impressions become somehow simultaneous in her mind, as if they had all been written on top of each other. In her 2008 book The Years, the French writer Annie Ernaux evokes the feeling experienced by a woman waking up in mid-afternoon after a post-coital snooze with her lover, and experiencing the return of many other moments in her life, from childhood on, when she similarly found herself waking from afternoon slumber. ![]()
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