He is seen floating from a house party to an after-hours bar to a basement club to an outdoor rave, through endless sessions of shit-faced palaver during what appears to be approximately twelve months in his social life following his breakup with a girlfriend of five years and what he terms the collapse of his “sense of stability.” The preamble gives a key to understanding Marczak’s approach to showing Krzysztof’s life-this isn’t the whole story, but rather the collection of a year’s worth of all-nighters, a memoir made of the stuff that no one can really remember the following day, a remembrance of blackouts past. Krzysztof is the nearest thing that All These Sleepless Nights has to a protagonist, and like the rest of the cast-mostly young Poles or transplants from around Europe and the US-he uses his own name in the film. Krzysztof Baginski, a pale kid around twenty who favors a white T-shirt, jeans, and a pompadour, and who resembles an Egon Schiele drawing of James Dean, looks out at (imagined?) fireworks over Warsaw from a lofty apartment with an admirable skyline view, and in voice-over runs through some suspicious figures which refer to collating a lifetime’s experiences: seven months of sex, two years of boredom, seventeen hours of breakups. It is on such a note of sober contemplation that Michal Marczak’s docufiction All These Sleepless Nights, a film that is most of the time very far from sobriety, begins. “A WHILE BACK, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.” This is how the nineteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud bade adieu to his carefree salad days at the opening of A Season in Hell (1873)-for none are quite so attuned to the evanescence of youth as the truly young, who can actually feel the stuff slipping through their fingers. Michal Marczak, All These Sleepless Nights, 2016, HD video, color, sound 100 minutes.
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