Sleepless Night

Vincent is a policeman. With his partner he raids a drug delivery and takes the goods. Someone is wounded in the robbery and it becomes clear whose the goods were: a club owner named Marciano. The next day Marciano takes Vincent's son. The meeting place for the exchange is the club: open all night, crowded, several floors. Vincent goes in with the goods. Then things tangle; two officers running an internal investigation come there the same night and the goods disappear. The film takes place almost entirely in that building. Frédéric Jardin directs. Tomer Sisley plays Vincent. What is most striking is the use of space; the kitchen, the corridor, the car park and the dance floor are used again at every stage of the narrative. The fight in the kitchen was shot in a single location and counted among the most cited scenes of the genre in recent years. The narrative runs close to real time and the character's wound worsens through the film. The moral ground it builds is murky; no policeman is clean and the narrative does not try to explain it. It belongs to a period in which French genre cinema revived, and it was remade in America. Its limit is the script; the plot rests on coincidence in places and the supporting characters are thinly written. Who it is for: viewers who like action thrillers set in a single location. Who it is not for: the violence is continuous, the cutting fast, and the narrative offers no depth of character.