Potential sub-genre: movies where people wander around a city at night and find some sense of magic. Robert Bresson is a big name when it comes to Arthouse filmmakers (I’ve only seen Pickpocket) but Four Nights Of A Dreamer (1971; Quatre nuits d’un rêveur) is a title that doesn’t come up so much in discussion. I took a shot on the basis of the title and an image of the main character, Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) who looks like what you’d think a young French painter in the 1970s might look like (a cross between Cousin Greg from Succession and a Noah Baumbach character). In the first five minutes, Bresson gives us a sense of his character, and it might determine whether you are in for the spirit of this movie: a carefree drifter, Jacques hitches out of the city for a walk in the countryside. I think of Bresson as a very precise, exacting filmmaker and not a shot is wasted to communicate this carefree yet focused individual, particularly when he comes back to his loft to paint and record prose on his cassette tape. Though he might sound insufferable, the way des Forets plays him I found quite charming. When Jacques wanders around Pont Neuf bridge one night, he sees a young woman about to throw herself off – Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) – and stops her. As they get to know each other, Marthe makes a promise to return to the bridge the next night to talk further; the “four nights” have already begun. We learn about the two characters’ lives, particularly why Marthe is so desperate and sad, conveyed in flashbacks. Along the way, they wander the streets and at times the world opens up – a concert on a well lit barge or the moon up in the sky. The film casts a certain spell and the two actors discovered for this film are lovely to watch. Based on a Fyodor Dostoyevsky short story ‘White Nights’, the tone is bittersweet, romantic, lonely and ultimately about the resolute acceptance that a dreamer might have within themselves towards whatever life throws at them. It’s a lovely film (also under 90 minutes) that I found a HD copy of through the Rarefilmm website. Recommended.
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