QUATRE NUITS D’UN RÊVEUR (FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER)
(Check out Johnathan Marlow’s movie review of Four Nights of a Dreamer. A new 4K restoration plays September 5-18 at Film Forum in New York before hitting more theaters this fall. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Rom-com a la French réalisateur Robert Bresson? The very thought seems preposterous and yet here it is / we are: a film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, albeit loosely, along the Pont Neuf. The essential framework of the short story remains. Girl meets boy. Girl loses boy. Different boy—painter / poet Jacques—meets same girl, the lovelorn Marthe. Interpersonal despair (with occasional humour) ensues? It does. If you’re the sort where the pratfalls in Solaris elicit a chuckle, Quatre nuits… is a riot.
The first night is ever-so-brief. Incidental. Who can remember much more than an initial inspiration? A mere five minutes of meet-cute in the midst of self-harm, attempted (half-heartedly).
deuxième nuit
A promise to return the next evening. A promise kept.
Bresson tackled Dostoyevsky two years earlier with Une femme douce [A Gentle Woman]. Next, after these Four Nights…? Lancelot du Lac [Lancelot of the Lake]. An avenue to get as far away from European youth culture as possible (or, at least, transporting it back to the Arthurian era until his bleak duo of Le Diable probablement [The Devil Probably] and L’Argent [Money]).
One could wonder and wander, perhaps a first pass at The Lovers on the Bridge precisely two decades later (latter) / earlier (former). Alphabetically, Bresson to Carax. An ideal match.
In another pairing, the stories of Jacques and Marthe are told.
Jacques rambles of his unbridled and unsatisfied lust, seeming to stalk whichever skirt passes. His oblique tape-recordings are poetic reflections, a part-fantasy of the world as it could be. He paints a little, filling swathes of colour on large canvases. As he paints, he listens to his recordings. Recordings he’d completed mere moments earlier. Or he rests in his day-bed and listens.
Marthe, contrary-wise, lives in the world as it is. She reflects on her uncomplicated family life and the burden of it all. She describes a developing fascination with an unseen (by her) lodger. Her obsession grows. When she learns that he is moving-out, the smitten Marthe immediately goes to him. Embraces him. Their passion is temporarily fulfilled. As quickly unfulfilled. He departs, promising to return in one year. He returns (but not to her).
Thereafter, respective tales told, Marthe and Jacques attend a screening. A film-within-a-film. An action movie (by way of Bresson)! Or an inaction movie. Guns. Gunshots. Glacially-paced denouement.
“We fell into a trap.”
troisième nuit
Jacques day-delivers a letter from Marthe to the boy from her past, asking him to come.
“If it rains…”
“It won’t rain.”
It rains.
He does not come.
We are graced with a bossa nova interlude from a boat passing down the Seine. For all its charm, Quatre nuits d’un rêveur captures the adolescence of early-1970s Paris along with its sights and sounds. The music, overall, is a highlight. Life could consist merely of listening. Observing the ripples of water in the wake. Stillness. Then silence.
quartième nuit
Everywhere Jacques looks, there is Marthe. Her name on a store-window. On a barge. She is everywhere and nowhere, all at once.
The young couple, newly minted and reunited for a fourth evening, are happy together. A happiness that could last forever. Or at least eighty-ish minutes of bliss compressed from a quartet of nights in the city of light.
One meets another. Another _____ one. The eternal return.
fin
QUATRE NUITS D’UN RÊVEUR [FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER] (1971)
dir. Robert Bresson [82min.] Janus Films
– Jonathan Marlow (@aliasMarlow), SV ARCHIVE [SCARECROW VIDEO] Executive Director
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