Nicole (Julianne Cóté) has just finished college and is back home for the summer. Luckily, her parents are on holiday, so she and her friend, Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent) have the spacious house and swimming pool all to themselves. That is until Nicole’s older bro, Rémi (Marc-André Grondin) shows up with his band and starts bashing out tunes in the living room.
Barely plotted mood piece about postponing adulthood, TDN is like a poorly assembled piece of IKEA furniture – all the different parts are there, they just don’t fit together properly.
One of the problems that plagues TDN as a film is the same problem that plagues Nicole as a character. She is, as the title suggests, sleepwalking through life. Passive, blaise about pretty much everything, Nicole just kind of hangs out. Even when her bro and his two bandmates – Pat (Simon Larouche) and JF (Francis La Haye) – invade her and Véronique’s perfectly peaceful girltopia with their ear-splitting sounds, Nicole reacts with little more than a shrug and a blank face.
There is another problem flashing like a half burnt out neon sign throughout TDN and that is Cóté’s performance. Though purposely lazy eyed, listless and emotionally restrained for most of the running time, you never get the sense that there is more going on within her. She radiates a flatness of character that suggests a lack of ability more than a purposeful acting strategy. Too often, she seems unsure of what to do on camera. She seems a bit lost or overwhelmed. Is this writer/director Stephane Lafleur’s fault? Some of the blame must fall his way. Either way, Nicole, as a character, is a major drag on the film and that’s – to state the obvious – a big problem.
Signs of adulthood and all its added complications and increased responsibility surround Nicole like so many vipers in the grass – her ex is getting married; Remi’s bandmate, Pat, is expecting his first child; and her best friend has her own place and is financially struggling to keep her head above water. In a kind of emotional and psychological paralytic state, Nicole drifts through the days comforted by the notion that she touches nothing and nothing touches her. Though adulthood waits impatiently with arms folded and head shaking disapprovingly from side to side, it will just have to stuff it for now.
It is the summer, though, so she can be somewhat forgiven for zoning out. Sealed off from the world of action and consequence, Nicole, instead, uses her mother’s credit card to book a fantasy trip to Iceland for her and Veronique. Clearly an impulsive stab at killing their shared boredom, this sudden sprint for the exits is in keeping with a childlike view of the world where nothing costs anything and wants are best satisfied immediately. In that way, the Iceland trip is Nicole’s first proactive attempt to push away the inevitable.
TDN also fails to build any kind of narrative momentum – drama breaks out here and there, but there is no sense that any of it is accumulating. Instead, the few moments of conflict or consequence that do rattle Nicole seem isolated from the rest of the film. One would-be crucial moment of turmoil fails to register mostly because the key act that precipitates it is not shown. Keeping a potentially revealing and exciting bit of action off-screen in a film starving for even a crumb of drama is one very strange decision. Add it to the other narrative missteps and, as the film progresses, you get the feeling that Laurent is bent on steering this ship into oblivion.
It’s nice to see a modern film shot in black and white, though whether it adds or detracts from the narrative, here, is hard to tell. B&W’s undeniable connection to the past and as a look almost completely absent from modern filmmaking may give TDN some separation from the pack, but it hardly helps. The film looks nice, clean – b&w’s got a way of making every person and object look a part of the whole. But, does that add anything? Not really.
On the truly bizarre side, there is the inexplicable addition of a 10 year-old boy, with the deep voice of a man, who continually hits on Nicole. Clearly, the boy is a physical manifestation of Nicole’s inner turmoil – he’s not ready for adulthood just like Nicole is not ready for adulthood. Naturally, they would make the perfect couple – all physical considerations aside. On paper, it’s a clever idea. In execution, though, it falls flat. The boy’s dubbed voice plays as amateurish instead of charming, quirky and insightful.
Plus, it clashes with the rest of the film which is devoid of any similar attempts at anything visually or aurally out of the ordinary. It’s as if another director decided to take over for a scene or two while the original director went out for a smoke. Films don’t work that way, but sometimes that’s how they feel.
There are films in which very little happens that use that lack of drama and action as a slow burn strategy to lull an audience into a sense of comfort before hitting them with a devastating turning point. “The Loneliest Planet” (2011) and “The Sisters Brothers” (2018) use that approach to devastating effect.
Then there are nearly plotless films where just hanging out with the characters is the point. The best of these films succeed because the characters are fun , multi-dimensional and serve to make a grander point that only becomes clear at the very end of their journey – Robert Altman’s gambler odyssey, “California Split” (1974) comes to mind.
And then there are films like “Tu Dors Nicole” that are neither. They have no devastating knockout punch they are setting us up for, nor are their characters interesting, fun or particularly charismatic.
TDN does have a point. Keeping his narrative sparse, his protagonist stuck and the world around her in constant motion, Laurent sketches out both the good and the bad that comes with Nicole’s decision to lay a little while longer then she should on the comfy cushions of childhood. Problem is, the film settles for a stylistic kind of comfiness stuck somewhere between Antonioni and John Hughes. Too much of the former and not enough of the latter leaves TDN going nowhere fast.
