A young student decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him.
A Man in a Dream, Un hombre que duerme, الرجل الذي ينام, Un Uomo che Dorme, Inimene, kes magab, Человек, который спит, Un uomo che dorme, Uyuyan Adam, 沉睡的人, 잠자는 남자, Człowiek, który śpi
France
France
"You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait. Be quite still and solitary. "
- Franz Kafka
You might think that with "no plot" or character development, The Man Who Sleeps wouldn't be such a compelling film. The original 1967 novel by Georges Perec didn't even cause much of a stir, and this 1974 film adaptation by the relatively unknown Bernard Queysanne fared no better on release. Yet, despite its subdued reception, the film holds profound messages, offering a deeply introspective exploration of the human condition. It’s not just a depiction of a student grappling with existential depression; it's a film that forces us into the…
After graduating college I thought I had things figured out. I had a paid internship that provided housing and other interns as roommates, at a maritime museum that was next to the ocean. Every day I woke up to my seaside surroundings and interacted with all kinds of people both indoors and outdoors, and every week we visited another museum to learn more about the field and just hang out as a group. In retrospect, that was one of the best periods of my life; certainly it was one of the most vibrant, and meaningful.
Though I wouldn't know it at the time, what I did next was the complete antithesis. I essentially worked a miscellaneous office job, doing whatever…
Solitary states via the vessel of surrealist structuralism; a dizzying, maddening film building upon an ever-growing sense of chaotic alienation and intense isolation, until even silence as well is eventually overwhelmed by the claustrophobia of having to function and blend and move adaptively amongst all of the movement surrounding you. Until the voice within your head that echoes over all of the extraneous voices you're meant to hear and know, pushes you further and further down, toward a space in which solace cannot be found even in the landscape -- not even in a sense of place, because that sense of place would only envelop you and pull you a greater distance from a notion of self-identity. And so you're…
You don’t want to see anyone or talk to, or to think, nor to go out, or move.
It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong —
That you don’t know how to live and that you never will.
This movie is one of the best I’ve ever watched, and I understand so much that it makes me physically sick. I understand perfectly; this is for those who drift through the relentless vast universe without any hope. For the wanderers, the restless souls who move from one place to another, seeking consolation in the anonymity of the transitory existence. With no purpose of being guided,…
"...thus begins and ends your kingdom..."
I couldn't in a million years, even if I tried, get across just how insanely personal this felt to me. But all of this; the feverish isolation, the breakdown of reality, the feeling of being a rat trapped in a maze with no escape, so completely captured the destructive feeling and hopelessness that accompanies depression and loneliness. This may be the finest film I've ever seen about those two experiences. What I do know is: its the most raw film about the two.
