Written by Swapnil Dhruv Bose

Carefully constructed as a solipsistic nightmare, The Man Who Sleeps will gently unsettle anyone who has ever been familiar with feelings of urban isolation and existential inaction. Based on Georges Perec’s 1967 novel A Man Asleep, Bernard Queysanne’s film defies any conventional categorizations. It is an open letter to the lost youth of the world who drift along from one location to another without any purpose, engaged in a sad and lonely rebellion against the hostility of the universe. Their weapon of choice is indifference, unwilling to admit that their half-hearted revolution is an exercise in futility.

Starring Jacques Spiesser as a 25-year-old student in Paris, The Man Who Sleeps chronicles his descent into nothingness as he flails around within the confines of modernity. A cheap reproduction of René Magritte’s “Not to Be Reproduced” is plastered on the cracked wall of his room, an ironic allusion to our nameless protagonist’s educated unoriginality. He spends his days by retreating to the comforts of sleep and drifting around an unforgiving cityscape where he is nothing but an impotent spectator. To protect himself from the expectations of reality, he has engineered his own realm of “unreality” in which he reads books that nobody bothers to read and humps the pinball machine to experience a perverse sense of intimacy.

The most brilliant element of this memorable collaboration between Queysanne and Perec is the film’s use of a narrator (voiced by Ludmila Mikaël). Almost like a voice in the protagonist’s head (and consequently our heads as well), she describes the painful mediocrity of his existence by talking to him directly. This conversational nature of the screenplay creates a startling interface between the audience and the collective conscience projected by The Man Who Sleeps. When she humiliates the protagonist by saying – “You are just a murky shadow, a hard kernel of indifference, a neutral gaze avoiding the gaze of others,” we feel personally attacked but there is a sense of beauty to it. It’s as if someone is reaching out from the illusion of the screen and caressing our loneliness with pointed words of understanding.

Very few works of art can recreate this atmosphere of solitude. Yusuke Yamamoto’s Welcome to the N.H.K. continues The Man Who Sleeps’ tradition of loneliness by contextualising it within a modern framework – the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan. However, a more appropriate spiritual successor is Frank Beauvais’ Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream. Like Queysanne’s masterpiece, it is a visual journal of absolute isolation and shares a similar contempt for the external world. More importantly, the narration in both these works have a unique rhythmic quality which metamorphoses into poetry. As for the visual narrative, The Man Who Sleeps employs montages that act as semaphores signalling to the void. Quite similar to the protagonist, the camera slides (instead of gliding) across an industrial labyrinth.

Setting the technical and cultural implications aside, Queysanne’s film is still relevant after all these years because of its philosophical force. “You are such a negligible speck,” the narrator tells us. “Your refusal is futile.” The Man Who Sleeps is for those of us who believe that shutting our eyes when confronted with the difficulties of the world is a political act. It criticises our inaction by labelling it as philosophical suicide, chastising an army of Sisyphuses who have stopped rolling their boulders.

Swapnil Dhruv Bose is an undergraduate student of English Literature at Presidency University, Kolkata. In his spare time, he grows disillusioned and writes about it. He is also a film columnist at Far Out Magazine.