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Street lights coalesce into effulgent abstractions in the opening titles, a painter's touch from start to finish. The rêveur (Guillaume des Forêts) is a Jean-Pierre Léaud decoy who thumbs a ride and shrugs when asked of his destination, then does somersaults in grim emulation of youthful jauntiness. Girl-watching in Paris, one is seen reflected on a shop window, another is followed until she boards a bus. "No one, an ideal, the woman in my dream." "That's stupid." Grave and caped, the suicidal maiden (Isabelle Weingarten) daintily removes her shoes and contemplates the waters under the Pont Neuf, the protagonist gets her to step back from the ledge, she puts her shoes back on. "Hoping and losing hope," everybody's story. White Nights along the Seine, not Visconti's opera but Robert Bresson's cantata, lyrical as only his stringent style can be. In his atelier, the boy dabs paint in between tape-recorder ruminations until a colleague drops by to pelt him with aesthetic pontifications: "I am for a mature art, open to its time. Which does not burst in contact with Nature but simply is a meeting of the painter and a concept." His beloved has promised herself to a Yale-bound boarder, who vexes her with tickets to an action flick—between flashbulbs on the red carpet and machine-guns on the screen, she blinks at a gangster's interminable death scene in Bresson's funniest sequence. ("We have fallen into a trap," she whispers to her tear-streaked Maman.) Moony kids in a parched cosmos, their absurd yearning surveyed by the moved-amused-envious old man behind the camera. A certain "musical phrase," animating the naked form before a mirror, propelling the bateau-mouche with Brazilian troubadour in tow. "Fini l'artisanat," l'amour existe. Romance is left bent over the canvas at the close, it's up to Carax to resuscitate it two decades later. Cinematography by Pierre Lhomme. With Maurice Monnoyer, Lidia Biondi, Giorgio Maulini, and Marku Ribas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |