The Man Who Sleeps

A twenty five year old student decides one morning not to sit his exam. Then not to call his friends, then not to speak, then not to want anything. He lies in his room in Paris, walks the streets, and tries to construct a complete indifference to the world. The film is adapted from Georges Perec's novel and keeps its hardest feature: the narration is in the second person. A voice keeps saying you, read here by Ludmila Mikael, while the man on screen barely speaks at all. It is shot in black and white, and the images of Paris are full of people while the state the voice describes is absolute solitude. It won the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974. The difficulty is that there is no event in any conventional sense, the character does not even have a name, and the voiceover runs for an hour without stopping. For some viewers this is a reading rather than a film. Who it is for: admirers of experimental cinema and of Perec. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative and character.