Four Nights of a Dreamer

Four Nights of a Dreamer is one of those films that European directors are much better at than American ones - expressing a lot merely through its cinematography, at times not making a lot of sense all while it meanders along in an expressive, quiet manner.

The movie is carried by the two leads - Isabelle Weingarten as Marthe and Guillaume des Forêts as Jacques - with all the other roles barely registering. Jacques is a melancholy young painter, alone yet not necessarily lonely. What comes through is his longing for a true love. Through happenstance, Jacques runs in to Marthe when she is at a difficult point in a relationship. They tell each other their stories in a series of flashbacks, then leading to their current situations. While under 90 minutes, the film moves along at a slow, even somnolent, pace. And, as an aside, there are some rather groovy and folky musical interludes that add to the film's air of longing.

Four Nights of a Dreamer is not a great film, it is definitely a pleasure to watch.

From all the Bressons I've seen this week, this one is the hardest to describe. I liked a lot, but I don't exactly know what it was that I liked. The film, taking place mostly at night in the streets and on the bridges of Paris is somewhere in between the typical lethargy and an a-typical hysteria and is about utterly lonely people that meet up with people who are even lonelier. It's fascinating to look how those change directions all the time, interrupt actions to start a completely different one, jump from one anecdote to another. It's a fascinating jumble; you never know what is going to happen next and very similar to Cassavetes' Shadows (which I tend to like more).

An art-school kid meets a sad-faced girl on the Pont-Neuf; she's about to leap. It seems her beau left for Yale, swore he'd meet her one year later to the day--and he's blown her off. Love ensues between the couple on the bridge; Joe Yalie fails to make his appointment; and all seems to be heavenly for the two young lovebirds. Until, of course, days later, Joe Yalie comes a-callin'...

The relationship between a painter's self-torturing love life and his efflorescent work life was explored with a riotous, blasting, punk-rock yet p**s-elegant glee by Martin Scorsese and company in the short film LIFE LESSONS. Bresson's version of a similar tale is, to put it lightly, less communicative. Late Bresson--from THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC on--puts a premium on mum's-the-word. But in a late, underappreciated masterpiece, UNE FEMME DOUCE, Bresson's deliberate muteness worked: this adaptation of a Dostoevsky story about a blinkered husband decrypting his wife's suicide prods at the question "What do women want?" with comic and sensuous tactics unseen elsewhere in Bresson. And the emphasis on the unreadable--made literal in Bresson's concentration on shoulders, hands, backs of heads--fit the material like a glove.

The Dostoevsky source material for FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER is simpler stuff. And more psychological stuff, too--which, mated with Bresson's deliberately dime-store-Indian, anti-acting style, makes for incoherence. You can't make out just exactly what Bresson thinks this movie is about, except a touching, and not altogether lecherous, affection for Today's Youth. It has freaky asides, like his other unhinged youth movie THE DEVIL PROBABLY: an art student pontificates on his moral agenda for painting in a bowlegged scene that suggests Bresson standing up in the movie theatre and reading from a tract. It has bits of rock music performed live that take you back to the with-it-ness of Otto Preminger's SKIDOO. And it has the hero's weird, unfinished, Pop Art-meets-Matisse paintings, everywhere. And it ends with a sadder-but-wiser shrug.

You get the feeling Bresson's heart and soul slammed painfully into every frame of this movie. It's also inscrutable and not absorbing in the least. Is this the fate of all master directors who make it to a ripe old age--they keep their chops, but they simply have no more stories they're impassioned to tell?

Four Nights of a Dreamer is not quite my favorite of the adaptations of Dostoyevsky's White Nights as that would to Visconti's achingly romantic and sad melodrama Le Notti Bianche, but it is a fairly engrossing drama that features some welcome and (from Bresson) unexpected humor that marks this as if not a departure than something a little different (though maybe needed after his prior, much more depressing but still great A Gentle Woman from two years before, also a Dostoyevsky story). What makes it so different is not that it focuses on someone who has an obsessive even OCD streak, but how he shows the character.

I think Jacques is so quiet about his obsessions, making odd eye-less paintings that no one will probably see outside of his one male friend and doing countless recordings into his portable tape recorder where he goes back to listen to the existential tragic romantic musings, and it may not be noticeable at first that he would be what is dubbed today an "Incel" (in France, you can get one of those at McDonald's, har har). Yet he is nice and sweet to the young Marthe, who is about to jump into a river when she first meets her as she is despondent over her lover not coming to see her since his return to Paris and to be by her side as she is overcome with her many many feelings about him.

I have to wonder if by this point in his career, or there may be less to wonder as it just seems to be the case, that 70 year old Bresson so knew his minimalist style, and this in a period of post Free-Love would-be Sexual Revolution times, that it was time to poke a little fun at what we are seeing. That may sound like a bold statement, but take the part of Marthe's "History" segment where we see her and her mother go to a film screening (she was kind of duped to go by some local guy who just wanted to screw with her) and it is a violent shoot-em up spectacle... only this being Bresson, everything is drained of emotion, to the point where a man is shot and style writhes around in poetic fashion and waits to do a hand motion until he can finally be at rest in death.

I watch that and couldn't help but laugh, and it is intentional (I should hope), and that was a pleasant surprise given that Robert Bresson was coming off of some of the most emotionally rigorous and sad films ever made (just imagine if Marthe and her mother had been seated for Mouchette!) This is not the dominant mode, but there is not only a sly streak here and there, and an apparent running commentary on the Jacques character - Bresson doesn't come out and say it directly, he doesn't have to as that is just the filmmaker he was, that while not a bad person he certainly is so alone that he has become maladjusted and his love for Marthe is both genuine and misguided - but on romance itself as a kind of mood.

I say this and yet I do think there are parts of this that have genuine romantic feelings, or at least there are those passages in the night segments where Jacques and Marthe come across groups playing guitar and singing, one group on a boat sailing down the river while some others are more vaguely Hippie/Folk like, and it is something that may or may not be affecting the characters but it does affect us. There is even a mood to some of these parts where these maybe/maybe not melancholic love-birds walk around and maybe Linklater saw this and had it somewhere in the back of his mind when writing/directing the first Before entry(?) Or if Jesse and Celine were less talky and more... French (yes, even more than Celine, one more har-har).

The end of the film is what makes this even more memorable or just interesting than what came before it. It is very good on the whole, and there is a sweetness to much of it that is so compelling to watch given that this filmmaker was so set in his ways with his actors and the whole "you must do this many takes so you are drained to your minimal essence as a peformer" while there is still an intensity in the eyes and some of the physical movements and gestures, which take on some extra importance (such as Jacques moving around those bottles and cans in his cabinet and his OCD is on full display to me, or the way Marthe looks at herself naked in the mirror as guitar plays).

Once that ending comes, it is this less ironic to me than inevitable; he will continue to paint and talk to his tape recorder, and his "non" life will go on. For now. This is a sneakily remarkable film that on paper is melodrama and executed is more satirical, if that makes sense.

Quatre nuits d'un rêveur was shown in the U.S. with the title Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971). It's written and directed by Robert Bresson, based on the short story "White Nights" by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Bresson has moved Dosteovsky's story from 19th Century St. Petersburg to 20th Century Paris, which I think works very well. Both cities are centers of art and romance, and the story and film are all about art and romance.

Jacques, a painter (Guillaume des Forêts), prevents Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) from committing suicide, and naturally, he falls in love with her. (In view of Ms. Weingarten's sadness and her ethereal beauty, Jacques basically had no choice but to fall in love with her.)

However, we soon learn that Marthe is in love with another man. He has been in the U.S. for a year, and was due home on that day. That fact that he did not call her is what prompted her suicide attempt.

The film follows Marthe and Jacques for the four nights of the title. They walk the streets of Paris, and return to the Seine where musicians on a tourist boat are playing samba music. Jacques is serious about his painting, and discusses art with a friend who comes to visit.

We know something is going to happen, but we don't know what. You'll have to see the film- -or read the short story--to find out what that something is.

Bresson--as always--directs with the secure sure hand of a master. Every shot is beautifully framed, and we can almost feel the Paris night and hear the lapping of the Seine against its banks.

We saw this intense, quiet film at the wonderful Dryden Theatre in Rochester's Eastman House. Other reviewers have noted that it's difficult to purchase on DVD. That's unfortunate, because it would work fairly well on the small screen, and it definitely is worth finding and seeing. It's a jewel-like masterpiece.