Crooked
cops are as French as frog legs and escargot.
In fact, there are varying degrees of police corruption, as viewers can
see in Frederic Jardin’s cops vs. cops vs. drug dealers shoot-out Sleepless Night (trailer here), which screens
during the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.
Vincent
and even more corrupt partner Manu just relieved some couriers of a huge
shipment of cocaine. Unfortunately, he
took a stiletto wound in the process.
Without time to be properly stitched up, he must quickly bundle his son
off to school and then show up at the station to play innocent. Events take a turn for the worse when the kingpin
Marciano abducts the lad, demanding the coke as ransom. Into the lion’s den, or in this case Marciano’s
club Le Tarmac, Vincent goes. When the
yet even more corrupt internal affairs officer swipes his hidden coke, the desperate
father starts improvising. This is when
things start getting good.
Poor
morally compromised Vincent bleeds in every corner of the up-scale hipster disco/restaurant/pool
hall, but he always gives as good as he gets.
The kitchen gets a particularly messy going-over, worrying the staff no
end. Every time Vincent returns to their
domain, the film gets an invigorating jolt of energy.
Tightly
helmed by Jardin and stylishly lensed by frequent Eastwood cinematographer Tom
Stern, Sleepless Night is sort of
like the adrenaline-charged, action-driven variation on the brooding Paris By Night, which screened at French
Rendezvous earlier in the year. As
Vincent, Tomer Sisley (a.k.a. Largo Wench) is not as cool as Roschdy Zem, but
he is still one bad cat.
While
not exactly legendary, Sleepless also
has some respectable villains, including Serge Riaboukine, whose somewhat
larger than life Marciano clearly enjoys the trappings of gangster life. French rapper Joey Starr also brings the
appropriate ferocity as Feydek, Marciano’s impatient buyer. Also making quite the impression in a small
role as a bystander helping Vincent, Dutch-Russian-Korean model Pom Klementieff
should definitely have a future looking alluring in films.
