Critics reviews

Whilst there's wit in the film's dialogue, most of its humor comes from some patient visual gags... The final image of the film is an amusing and strangely beautiful exaggeration of a relatively early shot in the film; rather than just serving as a point of humour, though, it also directly addresses the divide between what is real and what is dreamt. These recursive elements add a touch of complexity to the mostly aimless narrative—déjà vu as punchline.

Tu dors Nicole has its fair share of "quirk"; it's often a kind of masterclass in how to defang that adjective of the suffocatingly cute. What grounds it are the above-listed virtues of being grounded in very particular spaces, a firm sense of the simmeringly low-key rage that thankless underpaid work can bring, and the ability to tonally manage the split between drollery and rage.

Tu Dors Nicole is a lovely little film, but one doesn't want to make too big a case for it. We've had countless works about our early 20s — that hesitant period between adolescence and adulthood — and we'll have countless more after this. Will this movie stand the test of time? Should it even? Lafleur's film is a quiet trifle that sneaks up on you, like a pleasant dream you might have and then gradually forget. Its very slightness is its greatest weapon.

[The film] is forever drifting itself, though Nicole is anchored by Côté's wonderfully quizzical, deliberately low-key performance. None of this would work were Lafleur not doing gorgeously expressive work behind the camera.

Director Stéphane Lafleur shoots in black and white with a sure and delicate eye. It's an episodic film where some episodes (the camera drifting after Nicole as she wanders the streets fighting insomnia) work better than others (the adolescent boy who keeps making passes at her). The wry situational humor leaves less of an impression than the near-perfect sense of the heat-drenched wistfulness of summer.

[Nicole is] a wayward twentysomething, caught between her tenuous desires for independence and a more forceful reluctance to forgo the sweet pangs of juvenilia. Lafleur has a percipient eye for irrigating these dilemmas without overtly sentimentalizing them, especially as the film flirts with diagnosing Nicole's desolation as mental illness, manifest through insomnia and habitual forms of self-sabotage.

Tu dors Nicole is about the gradual build-up and explosive release of pressure in the life of a young woman, and much to his credit Lafleur builds that same tension into individual scenes and into the larger narrative.

The look and central relationship of Tu dors Nicole might recall Frances Ha, but Lafleur's formal control is something very different from Noah Baumbach's more off-the-cuff shot structure. Lafleur shoots sequences mostly in long takes with a bit of open framing; characters may stay central to the composition, but we are given the ability to observe the rest of the space each character inhabits and notice subtle clues concerning their background.

[Côté's] bone-dry presence is a good anchor for the film's less successful flirtations with a certain strand of indie tweeness that would otherwise be more trying, grounding in reality the harpsichord interludes that are presumably meant to illuminate Nicole's inner life. Though she's ultimately the second star after her director—who, from the tidy visual design to the odd soundscape, creates an almost annoyingly hermetic world—it's Côté that lets the whole thing breathe.

The [film], despite straining for effect with a cleansing forest-fire climax, owes some of its feel to American indie influences, though along those lines, Stéphane Lafleur's Tu dors Nicole ("You're Sleeping, Nicole") also had lazy-summer charms worth noting.