A new 4K restoration of a criminally underappreciated 1971 film by the great French master Robert Bresson.
Adapted from the short story White Nights by Dostoevsky it’s about Jacques (Guillaume des Forets), a lonely artist who wanders the streets of Paris at night. One evening he prevents a young woman- Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) from committing suicide by jumping off a bridge. They continue to meet for four nights where they reveal their dreams and desires to each other.
Jacques lives in a studio apartment where he applies small amounts of color to his canvases daily. He also records sounds of pigeons or his poetic reveries into a tape recorder. He’s a loner who wanders the street becoming besotted by the girls he sees- following one, then another, but never connecting. Marthe lives a bleak life with her mother and they take in borders. Marthe becomes romantically entangled with a young man who rents there, who is off to study at Yale in America for a year. But the year is up and he is back in Paris and has not contacted her, which leaves her in despair.
As the nights go on, Jacques finds himself hopelessly falling in love with Marthe.
Bresson’s use of music is spare but sublime. Flashes of street musicians playing. One exquisite sequence has Jacques and Marthe on a bridge. They listen as a band on a boat below them slowly drifts down the Seine.
No one makes movies like Robert Bresson. Pickpocket. Au hasard Balthazar. The Devil, Probably. Lancelot of the Lake. L’Argent. His films seem even more radical today. Director Paul Schrader calls him, “a spiritual artist who has forged a style so singular it resists imitation.” Bresson shoots in such an austere, meticulous, minimal way. It’s all about gestures, and sounds. At times, his cinematic choices seem so odd and random yet they creep up on you in emotional ways. Just Jacques sitting on a bench watching lovers in the park and the way their hands clutch at their partners. The whole sequence elicits such a strange, hypnotic power on the viewer. I also love that Bresson was fond of using non-actors in the leads for their look or their almost-supernatural beauty.
The only movie I can equate this with is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love for capturing a mood of such romantic longing. It’s just a ravishing, heartbreaking film.
This will be playing at The Film Forum (209 West Houston Street) from Friday, September 5- Thursday, September 18th.
