Love is hopeless.
I do know, do not be too shocked.
However that’s, in a nutshell, the parting phrases of Robert Bresson’s 4 Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d’un rêveur), depicting “passing ships within the evening” and asking: Is love silly? An phantasm? An artwork kind? It is a type of contained tales that does not work in some other context, however suspending your disbelief to see these characters as case research delivers rewards.
4 Nights of a Dreamer follows Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts), a struggling Parisian artist who occurs throughout Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) on the Pont Neuf one fateful evening and stops her from taking her personal life. Over the subsequent 4 nights, they return to this spot to deliberate on love and try to reconcile Marthe along with her estranged lover (Jean-Maurice Monnoyer).
4 Nights Of A Dreamer Is An Ethereal Image Of City Loneliness
4 Nights of a Dreamer begins with Jacques hitching a journey out to the nation for the day. As soon as he’s on this idyllic rural atmosphere, the whole journey is captured in a handful of photographs: him playfully somersaulting within the meadow, singing as he cheerfully walks by a confused household.
This brief story beat, forward of the title drop, is invaluable for the way it contrasts with the remainder of the film, which isn’t laser-focused on essentially the most picturesque scenes of Paris, however pretty in a subdued approach. The opening credit, enjoying towards the background of blurred metropolis lights, had been surprisingly breathtaking.
The film primarily oscillates between the nighttime setting of a vignette at Pont Neuf and daytime flashbacks of drab residences, illustrating city loneliness, the Metropolis of Love being a distant and irrelevant concept. The digicam additionally tends to linger on the shot of an city scene because the character walks out of view, disappearing again into town.
The music actually pops with how it’s interspersed over the silence, typically by means of musicians diegetically coming onto the scene, one of many story’s motifs that highlights the idealization of affection. 4 Nights of a Dreamer has that old-movie really feel that disconnects it from actuality — only a bit — however the actors have placing moments as they sullenly wander and philosophize.
4 Nights Of A Dreamer Is A Layered, Understated Treatise On Love
The film makes it clear by means of direct dialogue and recurring motifs that Jacque is the titular dreamer, falling in love many instances, recording his poetic ideas to play again for inventive inspiration. He falls for Marthe simply as rapidly, most likely convincing himself that this one is totally different as a result of he has really had a dialog along with her.
When the fact is that she is in love with another person, and nothing can change that, regardless of that man’s errors. However who’s Marthe to evaluate? She is definitely a related mirror to Jacques. She is aware of her outdated lover even lower than she is aware of Jacques, and is simply as impulsive about committing to him.
A marker of its time, 4 Nights of a Dreamer does not take Marthe’s tried suicide severely sufficient, as it’s merely the catalyzing incident to carry Jacques into her world. However in the present day, this plot level prompts further dialog, when it is laborious to consider that returning to a relationship the lack of which left her so depressed is nice for Marthe or her lover.
Then once more, perhaps he was totally devoted to her, and his delay was resulting from good old style miscommunication. However would Marthe’s relationship with Jacques have been any higher? They declare themselves “in love” simply as quick, and she or he spends the entire time speaking about how she’s going to transfer on from another person if he can bear along with her.
All of it continues to go in circles. Bresson additionally apparently wanted a supporting character we by no means see once more to point out up because the strangest home visitor ever, soliloquize on fashionable artwork for a minute, after which go away, as a method to tie collectively all of the themes — or simply set up how pretentious artists are.
4 Nights of a Dreamer does not totally escape being weighed down by its characters performing as if they haven’t any widespread sense, of their realm the place everybody falls in love in two minutes. However 50 years later, the performances nonetheless land as a compelling lesson within the nonsensical state of strange humanity.