Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971)

User Rating:

8.0/10   

Director:

Robert Bresson

Writers:

Robert Bresson (writer)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (short story "White Nights")

Release Date:

29 June 1971 (West Germany)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Plot:

The 'dreamer' is Jacques, a young painter, who by chance runs into Marthe as she's contemplating suicide on the Pont-Neuf in Paris...

Plot Keywords:

Night | Lover | Bridge | Love | Auto Stop

Awards:

2 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Isabelle Weingarten	...	Marthe
Guillaume des Forêts	...	Jacques
Maurice Monnoyer	...	Marthe's Lover
Lidia Biondi	...	Marthe's Mother
Jérôme Massart	...	Jacques' Visitor
Patrick Jouané	...	Gangster (segment "Amour - quand tu nous tiens")

Also Known As:

Four Nights of a Dreamer (USA)

Runtime:

87 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Pont Neuf, Paris 1, Paris, France

Company:

Albina Productions S.a.r.l.

Quotes:

Marthe: What's the matter?
Jacques: I love you. That's the matter.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in La maman et la putain (1973)

Have you heard about the lonesome loser? Beaten by the Queen of Hearts every time.

An art-school kid meets a sad-faced girl on the Pont-Neuf; she's about to leap. It seems her beau left for Yale, swore he'd meet her one year later to the day--and he's blown her off. Love ensues between the couple on the bridge; Joe Yalie fails to make his appointment; and all seems to be heavenly for the two young lovebirds. Until, of course, days later, Joe Yalie comes a-callin'...

The relationship between a painter's self-torturing love life and his efflorescent work life was explored with a riotous, blasting, punk-rock yet p**s-elegant glee by Martin Scorsese and company in the short film LIFE LESSONS. Bresson's version of a similar tale is, to put it lightly, less communicative. Late Bresson--from THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC on--puts a premium on mum's-the-word. But in a late, underappreciated masterpiece, UNE FEMME DOUCE, Bresson's deliberate muteness worked: this adaptation of a Dostoevsky story about a blinkered husband decrypting his wife's suicide prods at the question "What do women want?" with comic and sensuous tactics unseen elsewhere in Bresson. And the emphasis on the unreadable--made literal in Bresson's concentration on shoulders, hands, backs of heads--fit the material like a glove.

The Dostoevsky source material for FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER is simpler stuff. And more psychological stuff, too--which, mated with Bresson's deliberately dime-store-Indian, anti-acting style, makes for incoherence. You can't make out just exactly what Bresson thinks this movie is about, except a touching, and not altogether lecherous, affection for Today's Youth. It has freaky asides, like his other unhinged youth movie THE DEVIL PROBABLY: an art student pontificates on his moral agenda for painting in a bowlegged scene that suggests Bresson standing up in the movie theatre and reading from a tract. It has bits of rock music performed live that take you back to the with-it-ness of Otto Preminger's SKIDOO. And it has the hero's weird, unfinished, Pop Art-meets-Matisse paintings, everywhere. And it ends with a sadder-but-wiser shrug.

You get the feeling Bresson's heart and soul slammed painfully into every frame of this movie. It's also inscrutable and not absorbing in the least. Is this the fate of all master directors who make it to a ripe old age--they keep their chops, but they simply have no more stories they're impassioned to tell?