Music, Paris, and Young Love Enchant in Revival of ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’

The Film Forum’s upcoming revival of Robert Bresson’s “Four Nights of a Dreamer” (1971) is a major event for several reasons, not least of which because it shows the renowned filmmaker in a lighter mode than fans might expect. Known for his austere style, philosophical and spiritual themes, and bleak subject matter, the French auteur generally made movies that can feel harsh and cold, such as 1959’s “Pickpocket” and 1966’s “Au hasard Balthazar,” the latter of which critic Pauline Kael described as either a masterpiece or “painstakingly tedious and offensively holy.” While not a masterpiece, “Four Nights” is neither boring nor preachy. For the most part it plays like an enjoyable and teasingly ironic romance, focused as it is on a young pair of would-be lovers, Jacques and Marthe, in Paris. The director’s second feature not in black-and-white, the film abounds in vibrant hues of red, blue, and other colors, with the pristine 4K restoration highlighting Bresson and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme’s painterly sensibilities. That Jacques is a painter dovetails perfectly with the imagery’s vivid, pictorial quality, entrancing the viewer’s eye to see what an artist sees.For those who ever wondered what a Bresson movie musical might look and sound like, the rarely screened picture provides the answer. Using almost no music in his more characteristic works, he incorporates several songs in “Four Nights,” though nearly all are part of the characters’ experiences. These consist of a folk ballad, a Rolling Stones-esque ditty, and Brazilian lullabies, one of which is played by a band aboard a boat floating down the Seine at night as the potential couple watch from Pont Neuf. To say that the scene, not to mention the film’s general mood, is romantic is putting it mildly, with one wondering if Bresson was inspired by a fellow Frenchman and movie musical master, Jacques Demy (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”).The famous Parisian bridge figures prominently in the narrative: One night, Jacques prevents a despairing stranger (Marthe) from throwing herself over its edge into the river. After walking her home, the two arrange to meet at the same time and place the next night, thus beginning their regular rendezvous on Pont Neuf. On the subsequent evening, they tell each other their stories, to which Bresson flashes back. Guillaume des Forêts and Isabelle Weingarten in ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer.’ Via Janus FilmsWe see Jacques’s lonely life as he follows pretty women he passes on the street, forgetting about one when another passes by. Later, in his studio apartment, he records imagined romantic trysts with these women on his tape recorder. We also see him visited by a former art school acquaintance, whose minimalist paintings Bresson gently mocks and in whose pontifications about aesthetics one hears the filmmaker’s own “Notes on the Cinematographer.”Jacques’s almost ascetic life corresponds with Marthe’s listless one. She lives with her mother in an apartment that accommodates the occasional lodger. When a bookish new boarder moves in, the jeune femme is curious yet standoffish, particularly when the unnamed young man asks her to the cinema. This eventually leads to an amusing movie-within-a-movie scene in which Bresson parodies the multiple climaxes, melodramatic deaths, and sentimentality of action films. Marthe does fall in love with the lodger, but their relationship is short-lived as he leaves soon for Yale, promising to come back to her a year later. Back in the present, she explains to Jacques that her lover’s return to Paris and avoidance of her is what prompted her suicide attempt the night before. Jacques advises her to write a letter that he will deliver to the fellow’s friends, and on the next two nights, Marthe waits on the bridge for a reunion with her beau, with the painter close by should he not appear.Bresson based the film on the 1848 novella “White Nights” by Dostoevsky, whose works he had adapted before. He retains the text’s nightly structure and most of its essence, while updating it to the Paris of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Wherever Jacques walks during the day, one glimpses the anonymous bustle of the city, feeding the protagonist’s isolation, much as it does in Dostoevsky’s story. As he gets to know Marthe in the evenings, though, Jacques grows smitten, and Bresson has his hero see her name everywhere, mirroring the fantastical feeling of falling in love. Both central actors, Guillaume des Forêts and Isabelle Weingarten, were nonprofessionals, as was Bresson’s wont. He didn’t even call them actors but “models,” preferring them to be affectless. Their good looks certainly match the more fashionable side of the word, though the director’s required impassivity proves tricky for the fetching actors. At least Mr. Forêts has an easier time of it since Jacques must hide his affection for Marthe until the final night. While the auteur isn’t known for being a sensuous visual stylist, the close-ups of hands in his films point to an artist concerned with craft and intimacy. This imagistic instinct serves him well in “Four Nights,” such as when we see Jacques slowly paint and when Marthe peers at her body in the mirror. The quiet spell cast in these moments only adds to the film’s gestural alchemy, intense melancholy, and sustained inquiry on free will, confirming it as Bressonian in the end.

Music, Paris, and Young Love Enchant in Revival of ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’

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