The night as blank canvas where people trace impulsive paths with their bodies, Chantal has twice before captivated me with something like this. She is a gentle soul, gentle in the distance from which she views, alert to the hum of transience. Once more she gives us yearning in faint orbits.
It's pure listless summer night this one, one of the most atmospheric works I've found. Life for her is woven from breath and space, the moment that fleets before we can hold onto. She captures marvelous moments here; my favorites show a little girl rushing down the stairs and out the house as lovers embrace in the street, a young couple eloping in the night from a veranda door.
She begins to lose me when it's about no life in particular. Jeanne Dielman and Anna's Meetings were embodied in a woman who wonders and waits as she makes her way. Here we follow a dozen people through a hot summer night in the city. They come and go from places, wait for someone, pursue or leave each other in the street. Utterances are few, we infer from glances and bodies. Embrace or the urge to escape from embrace that has grown tired is the recurring pattern.
It's even more abstract and sensory than before. Purely on a moment- by-moment basis it's marvelous work. But sprawling as we do, not knowing these people as more than figures going to and from, it becomes choreographed performance, a study of form rather than journey that cuts through it. Most likely this was the specific intention. It brought to mind Pina Bausch and her dances of impulse painting itself with bodies. I see that she would make a film on Pina soon after.
It's a very tender balance anyway. You want - as Ozu did early on - to sift through the clamor of life to find those moments that lay bare the heart that minds, the body that is kept awake at nights, but I would rather have it reflected back in a way that tethers me to sleepless nights I've known, as a consciousness that inhabits a world that surrounds, which is how we know the world. It always comes back to having this one body, and to land in brief moments of different lives, the tethers grow lax and it moves to an omniscient view, a formal visit.
But this is Chantal choreographing sketches on life as all this merry-go-round, viewers who are interested in form will have a ball.
