Film Review
What is left when the dreams of youth have turned to dust and the urge
to rebel has given way to a placid acceptance of conformity? What
is left is a languid night of the soul scented with melancholia and a
bitter aching for release - at least this is what Philippe Garrel
implies in his darkest and most intensely poetic film to date.
Adopting the well-worn conventions of the traditional road-movie,
Le Vent de la nuit takes us on a
long day's journey into night, towards the welcome abyss to which its
three tortured protagonists are irresistibly drawn, like moths to
candlelight. Garrel hardly needs to resort to dialogue to allow
his characters to express what they feel. The sombre images,
stark and eerily static like memories frozen in time, say all that
needs to be said in this haunting existential lament.
In the tragically disillusioned character of Serge we discern a
slightly mocking self-portrait of the film's author. One of the
most committed auteurs of the French New Wave, and one of just a
handful that was still actively making films in the late 1990s,
Philippe Garrel exemplifies an idea of cinema that has pretty well gone
out of fashion but who refuses to go with the flow and sell out to the
dictates of today's overly profit-conscious cinema. Garrel is the
supreme example of the film director as auteur and his films are as
personal and idiosyncratic as anything produced during the glory days
of the Nouvelle Vague. The flame of May 68 may have long since
burned out but its revolutionary fervour still clings to Garrel and his
films, a sweet odour of defiance tinged with bitterness.
The influence of the more prominent figures in the French New Wave is
readily felt in much of Garrel's work.
Le Vent de la nuit has a particular
resonance with the later, more nihilistic films of François
Truffaut, most notably
La Femme d'à côté
(1981). The three main characters - Serge, Hélène
and Paul - form a love triangle that nods towards Truffaut's
Jules
et Jim (1962) - but they are also strongly related to
identically named characters in the films of Claude Chabrol. Paul
(
Les
Cousins) is the half-hearted student casually looking for
meaning in his life; Serge (
Le Beau Serge) is the solitary
outsider burdened with a lifetime of disappointments; and
Hélène (
La Femme infidèle) is
the unfaithful wife who takes a young lover as a vital therapy to help
her cope with the stifling tedium of her vacuous bourgeois existence.
The New Wave symbolism is hardly subtle but it doesn't need to
be. This is merely a set of markers that Garrel uses to direct us
on his bleak excursion towards his own personal heart of
darkness. At first it seems paradoxical that Garrel, the least
commercially minded of filmmakers, should cast such a high ranking diva
as Catherine Deneuve in a lead role. Yet Deneuve is herself the
ultimate paradox - an actress with massive box office appeal who is
herself a kind of auteur, willing and able to expose her soul in
challenging roles for directors who are unlikely to be known by anyone
other than the most resolute of art house audiences. The film
begins with Deneuve ascending a spiral staircase, looking as glamorous
and aloof as any classic Hollywood diva you care to name. But the
ascent seems to go on for ever and as we watch Deneueve is transformed
before our eyes into an ordinary middle-aged woman engaged in the most
sordid of enterprises, an act of infidelity with a much younger
man. It's the most startling kind of striptease, a
stripping away of lies and preconceptions to reveal the essential
person beneath the fabricated myth.
Garrel exploits the paradox that is Deneuve perhaps better than any
other filmmaker who has employed her and she becomes a powerful driver
in the destructive intrigue involving the other two protagonists, both
played with consummate skill by two other formidably talented actors of
the French screen, Daniel Duval and Xavier Beauvois. The contrast
between these two is striking and effective, Beauvois's open-faced
geniality rendering the dark solemnity of Duval's portrayal of a
suicidal loner all the more disturbing and poignant.
Le Vent de la nuit ends with a
cri de coeur that cuts through the
spectator like a sudden, sharp gust of night wind, and for one fleeting
moment we catch a glimpse of the sheer pointlessness of
existence. We live by day, but the darkness is never far from our
thoughts. With merciless restraint and the subtlest of irony,
Garrel brings us into contact with the terrifying nothingness of our
being.
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Philippe Garrel film:
Les Amants réguliers (2005)
Film Synopsis
For some time, Paul, a 30-something arts student, has been having an
affair with an older married woman, Hélène. The
relationship no longer satisfies Paul, so he takes advantage of a trip
to Italy to put some distance between them. Whilst attending an
arts exposition at Naples, Paul meets Serge, an older man with whom he
has an instant rapport. Not knowing that Serge is depressed and
intends to kill himself shortly, Paul agrees to accompany him back to
Paris. For one man, this is a chance to become better acquainted
with a country he has always loved. For the other, it is a final
pilgrimage to those places that have marked his unsettled life...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.