![]() ![]() ![]() READ MORE: The Director Of ‘All These Sleepless Nights’ Doesn’t Care If You Believe His Film is Non-Fiction If you spend 700 days waiting for something to happen, how many days do you spend remembering that something did? More than just a hypnotically hyper-real distillation of what it means to be young, “All These Sleepless Nights” is a haunted vision of what it means to have been young. ![]() The movie may not have much of a story, but by the time it’s over (some 100 minutes and nearly as many EDM house parties later), enough our hedonistic hero will have wised up just enough to begin questioning his logic. Surveying the whole of Warsaw through the floor-to-ceiling windows of a posh high-rise apartment, he concludes that he’ll spend 700 days waiting for something to happen. In a voiceover that feels lifted from an early Wong Kar-Wai film, Krzysztof reduces life to its raw data, theorizing that people spend seven months having sex before they die, 51 days of figuring out what to wear, and so on. From the opening images of fireworks exploding over downtown Warsaw, to the stunning final glimpse of Marczak’s main subject - Krzysztof Baginski (playing himself, as everyone does), who looks and moves like a young Baryshnikov - twirling between an endless row of stopped cars during the middle of a massive traffic jam, the film is high on the spirit of liberation. Unfolding like a plotless reality show that was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, this lucid dream of a movie paints an unmoored portrait of a city in the throes of an orgastic reawakening. A mesmeric, free-floating odyssey that wends its way through a hazy year in the molten lives of two Polish twentysomethings, this unclassifiable wonder obscures the divide between fiction and documentary until the distinction is ultimately irrelevant, using the raw material of real life to create a richer story of drift and becoming than “Song to Song” could ever manufacture from oblivious celebrities trying to find their characters between the notes. “Timeless” is a much-abused word, but if any recent country album deserves it, Sleepless Nights does.It would be reductive and unfair to say that Michal Marczak’s “ All These Sleepless Nights” is the film that Terrence Malick has been trying to make for the last 10 years, but it certainly feels that way while you’re watching it. A note of suppressed desire adds extra emotional tug to “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” and “Please Help Me, I’m Falling.” Emory Gordy’s production keeps things sparse along classic lines, featuring Al Perkins’ keening pedal steel work and Hargus “Pig” Robbins’ melancholy piano. She especially connects with a brace of tunes made famous by George Jones - on “Why Baby Why” and “He Thinks I Still Care,” she interprets the lyric with the same sort of self-torturing gusto that Jones achieved in his own versions. Loveless embodies the suffering within classics like “Sleepless Nights,” “There Goes My Everything,” and “Color of the Blues” to a shiver-inducing degree. And still, the excellence of these tracks goes beyond expectations. ![]() The singer’s roots in traditional country have long been evident, underpinning even the most commercial of her ‘90s hits. On 2008’s Sleepless Nights, Patty Loveless draws upon three decades’ worth of honky tonk torment to create one of the best-realized albums of her career. Nothing captures the sense of exquisite romantic sorrow like a great country ballad. ![]()
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