La Nuit fantastique (1942) - film review

Denis is an impoverished student in Paris who scrapes a living by working nights in the Halles market.  Sick with near-exhaustion, he begins to dream about an elusive woman in white, with whom he becomes infatuated – to the chagrin of his girlfriend Nina.  One night, Denis falls asleep in the street and is awoken when a stranger brushes past him.  Believing he is still dreaming, Denis is surprised to see the woman of his dreams.  He follows her into a restaurant when he is invited to join the strange woman, Irène, and her even stranger entourage.  Her father, an illusionist named Thalès, intends to marry her to his assistant, Cadet, but Irène has other plans.  Denis soon suspects something is amiss and, sure enough, he realises that Thalès had hatched a dastardly scheme to rob his daughter of her fortune.  Is Denis dreaming or can this be for real…?

La Nuit fantastique is an intriguing work from director Marcel L’Herbier, who is probably best known for his landmark silent classics such L’Argent (1929).  Inspired by the films of Georges Méliès, L’Herbier was presumably aiming to create a film that is every bit as baffling and visually stunning as Méliès’ films had been when they were first shown.  To a large extent, L’Herbier is successful – La Nuit fantastique is quite unlike any other French films of its period, giving far greater emphasis to visual technique than conventional storytelling devices.  Whilst L’Herbier is no where near as inventive as Méliès was in his day, there are some very memorable sequences in the film, most notably the eerie scene where the film’s hero and heroine are seen from the point of view of a sinister blind man.

Whilst the film wins several points for originality and has an infectious sense of fun throughout, its narrative structure is painfully weak and it is hard to warm to the film’s hero (played rather blandly by Fernand Gravey).  However, Micheline Presle is stunning as the ethereal and slightly unhinged Irène, although it is Saturnin Fabre who steals the show with a deliciously over-the-top portrayal of self-mocking villainy.

On the downside, the plot appears to meander rather aimlessly for the most part, and it’s all too evident that the action is taking place within the confines of a studio.  However, there are plenty of good laughs along the way, the whole thing feeling like a melange of a madcap Hollywood farce from the 1920s and a rather good Christmas pantomime – but garnished with the mood of a film noir thriller and a soupçon of visual poetry reminiscent of the work of Vigo and Cocteau.  It may not be L’Herbier’s best film but La Nuit fantastique is probably the one that ranks as his most gloriously off-the-wall and unpredictable.

© James Travers 2005

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