Perfected Simplicity: Jang Kun-Jae's Sleepless Night

Jang Kun-Jae's Sleepless Night will play as part of the Museum of Modern Art's ContemporAsain series on Saturday 8/10 and Sunday 8/11. I wrote about the film earlier this year, and have revised that piece below:

The utter simplicity of Jang Kun-Jae’s Sleepless Night makes it feel like such a tender work of art, whose intimacy feels utterly sublime in its feeling. Here’s a film about a couple in their early 30s. They both have jobs and seem genuinely happy with each other. They eat dinner, go on walks in the park, and wash each other in the shower. This is an actual couple, who have a major concerns about where their life is heading, but it never dominates their thoughts or minds.

The digital frames of Sleepless Night (not to be confused with the French action film) might come off as almost amateurish, but Jang is no amateur. This South Korean director, making his second feature (I’ve been told his first feature, Eighteen, is equally impressive), seems to be inspired by a wave of great Asian artists behind him: Yasujiro Ozu, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Hong Sang-soo. It's a film with almost no pretensions to raise the stakes of its narrative beyond its extremely limited scope, but it executes it with such lyrical precision, that it held me rapturous for its brief, 65-minute run time.

Updates from the Land of Film and Television

A recap of recent work...

Sleepless Night, a very small and intimate South Korean drama I saw as part of the Museum of the Moving Image's First Look series, is a genuine, honest, and moving portrait of a young marriage. It's sure to be near the top of my 2013 film list, that is, if it gets a release. I wrote about it in the hopes that it can get a distributor.

I don't know why I was curious about the Mark Wahlberg neo-noir thriller Broken City, but then I learned that Allen Hughes of the Hughes Brothers was directing. Too bad it seems nobody bothered to show up. I reviewed this travesty over at In Review Online.

I have a really weird obsession with watching NBC's Smash. Don't ask me why, but I find it fascinating to watch and tweet-mock a show with friends. Anyways, I did a piece over at Indiewire talking about the ways it will change in the next season with a new showrunner.

Sleepless Night: No Exit

Sleepless Night

Directed By: Frédéric Jardin

Written By: Frédéric Jardin and Olivier Douyère, from a scenario by Jardin and Nicolas Saada

Starring: Tomer Sisley, Serge Riaboukine, Julien Boisselier, Joey Starr, Laurent Stocker, Birol Ünel, and Lizzie Brocheré

Director of Photography: Tom Stern, Edited By: Marco Cavé and Christophe Pinel, Production Design: Hubert Pouille, Original Music: Nicolas Errèra

            The pounding rhythms of the club in Sleepless Night form a mix tape of styles through the narrative of this French thriller by newcomer Frédéric Jardin. While the film takes place in reality with high situation stakes, the film moves from room to room and presents what feels like an entirely different world, each with its own ecosystem and rules. Yet all are held together by the music that echoes throughout.

            The comparisons some critics have made to Die Hard for Sleepless Night are not far off, as the film presents an intense, non-stop thrill ride about one man’s insane attempts to rescued his son from gang leaders. Jardin’s film begins with a murder and ends in blood. Like the recently lauded The Raid (though not in these corners), Sleepless Night is low in ambitions but high in execution. It’s a genre piece done right, never too distracting with its narrative, but always fascinating in it’s visual set pieces.