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"Quelle belle nuit," an insomniac's journey by Chantal Akerman. La Ronde fractured, dozens of shards of private dramas not quite intertwining over the course of a languorous summer night. A woman meets her lover at a pub while another couple looks on from nearby tables, separated until a sudden embrace smashes through the severe symmetry of the frame, a break-up segues into a defiant dance in a deserted restaurant, an older couple plans to venture out as a man nurses a lonesome cup of coffee, and so on into the morning. Aurore Clément in a red dress is the most familiar face in the mix of actors and nonprofessionals, a panorama of aching urban dwellers stepping in and out of apartments, hooking up or barely missing each other ("Elle est déjà partie"), a rendezvous kept and then broken. Too hot to sleep but not too hot to dream, Brussels as a democratic center of longing with children and elderly and straight and queer and native and immigrant all part of the nocturnal, plaintive murmur. "Come with me. No? ... I don't think we still love each other ... Keep me from drinking. I am scared." Une chanson italienne, a W.C. Fields joke (matron packs her bags but ends up back home, alarm clock goes off moments after her head hits the pillow). Akerman's compositions are as rigorous as ever, yet the timbre is lighter and fleeter to reflect the ephemeral nature of the fancies she captures—the sublime closing sequence reverse-tracks down a corridor while a couple's music vainly attempts to ward off the traffic noises implacably ushering in dawn and reality. Rudolph's Choose Me is just over the rise, and there are lambent consequences for Claire Denis and Tsai Ming-liang. Cinematography by Caroline Champetier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |