Insomnia

I saw Erik Skjoldbjærg’s film Insomnia the week it came out in New York, in June of 1998. For some reason, I was primed to see it—perhaps only because of my pre-existing interest in stories set in The North. I saw it with a friend of mine from high school, who could usually be counted on to see art films once we both moved back to NYC after college. We were blown away by the film’s style and simplicity, and the intensity of its character study. I remember sitting in a café down the street from Lincoln Plaza, discussing it for hours, laughing about how my friend had clutched my arm during the movie because the tension got so extreme.

The thing I noticed, watching it again, was how every frame, every gesture of the opening moments means something and has been chosen for a reason. The first minute or so of the movie is a montage of the crime at the heart of the story, rendered in a grainy, bleached out, stilted set of shots reminiscent of an old home movie. This visually separates it from what follows, as though the crime is one thing and its consequences another. The home movie tone also gives it the quality of memory, which is inherently unreliable. When the main action starts, the very first shot is of the sun through clouds, and the second is Stellan Skarsgård’s character flinching and blinking in response to it—already setting up the relentlessness of the midnight sun as a major theme of the story.

Just a few frames later, the camera pulls out enough to show another man resting on Skarsgård’s shoulder. With a gesture or two—a skeptical glance, a twitch of the shoulder—Skarsgård conveys his ambivalence about the other man being so close to him.

And then, just as quickly, the other man wakes and makes a joke, and Skarsgård is laughing with him.

We are all of two and a half minutes into the movie, and most of its themes and structure have been set up. There is a remarkable gesture about ten seconds after this build up and release of tension. Just when you are wondering what the real relationship is between these two, Skarsgård strikes a note of deep intimacy when he reaches in his partner’s inside jacket pocket and pulls out his pen, to jot down a few notes on the case file he’s been reading. So, again, the viewer becomes curious about just how close or how far apart these two are.

This elegant build-up of tension was thrown into greater relief when I watched the beginning of Christopher Nolan’s remake of the movie. Although the set-up is similar—two men on a plane, flying in some obviously northern place—everything about the notes it hits is different. In the Nolan version, you look down on a glacial landscape, rather than looking at the sun, so although that successfully conveys “north,” it does nothing to tie into the restlessness of the title, and the role that lack of sleep plays in the plot. The two men are seated apart, and reveal most of their relationship through dialogue rather than gesture. Also, visually, the shots are missing the sense of similarity between the two, the faint suggestion of brotherhood that turns into a stronger element of the Skjoldbjærg version. Nolan obviously admired the Norwegian film, but I got the sense that he did not truly understand what he liked about it. Or he simply couldn’t reproduce it, with the tools he had to hand. Having made the film through a big studio, with big stars, he found it impossible to strike the subtle notes that give the Skjoldbjærg its quiet power.

On second viewing, the intensity of the character study became even more obvious. No wonder my friend and I felt so much tension that we gripped our seats and each other. We had been primed for it from the beginning, in layer upon layer of masterful shots, with such a lack of fanfare that we did not notice until it overtook us entirely.