Sean Burns
A woman and a man sit beside each other in a quiet café. They’re at separate tables, both facing forward, sipping their drinks and pretending not to notice one another. She steals a glance at him. He returns it when he thinks she isn’t looking. He moves to pay his check and she quickly does the same. He gets up to leave and she gathers her purse, a “now or never” look on her face as she screws up the courage to stand in front of him. The two hurl themselves into each other’s arms.
The title of Chantal Akerman’s 1982 Toute Une Nuit is translated onscreen as “A Whole Night,” but really it’s really only parts of one — dozens of mysterious, quicksilver interactions like the moment described above. We meet more than 70 characters on a long, hot summer night’s journey into day, catching them on the fly as they come together or part ways. There’s hardly any dialogue, no character names and no plot to speak of. While we might return to some of these people later in the evening, others will simply walk off into the shadows of the Brussels night. A glimpse of them is all we get, and sometimes that’s all you need.
It’s cinematic pointillism, with a cumulative effect that takes your breath away. Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a durational epic of inaction that locks down the camera for such long, still stretches that it seems to bend the rules of space and time while you’re watching it. Toute Une Nuit works in an almost diametrically opposed register. It’s a movie of nothing but climaxes, a dizzyingly romantic array of clinches and farewells that becomes a hypnotic abstraction of bodies clasping together and ripping themselves asunder. You watch it like fireworks. Akerman doesn’t employ a conventional score, instead allowing the sound of heels clattering on the pavement to become the percussion track, the steps rushing closer or trailing off into the eerie stillness of night.
Sometimes there’s a cheesy Italian love long leaking out of the radios. It’s always the same one, with a gloriously corny, cascading crescendo. We hear blurs of it coming out of car stereos as they pass by, or it’s on the tinny radios indoors, where the characters sometimes dance. Oh, how they dance – clutching each other close and flinging themselves around as if their lives depended on it. The bits and pieces of dialogue are evocative enough – or banal enough – for us to fill in the blanks on our own. “How can you love him?” “I don’t think we still love each other,” and the movie’s most oft-repeated utterance: “Come.”
There’s no sex and very little in the way of kissing. The movie’s romantic gestures are either too grand or too defeated for conventional lip-locks or any rumpy-pumpy. It’s not all couples, either. Some of these people are desperately alone, like the man standing mournfully in front of an Edward Hopper-looking storefront, or the poor bastard tossing and turning just trying to get some sleep. The arc of Toute Une Nuit will be familiar to anyone who has ever stayed up all night. The intense flurry of activity tapers off over the course of the film’s 91 minutes, settling into a mood that’s quieter and more reflective before dissipating into the cold light of day.
Talking to the BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine in 1984, Akerman admitted that she didn’t know while she was shooting it if a movie made entirely of fragments would work, but she wanted to capture the romantic unreality of night. “I think the night is very much like a set – it’s black,” she explained. “You see a woman in a red dress, you see only outlines and everything else disappears, while in the morning you see all the details. I believe that life, too, works completely differently at night. The night is more unreal, more surreal; at night melodrama can come through, but in the morning, ordinary life starts again.”
Some guy from New Jersey once sang that we should show a little faith because there’s magic in the night. Akerman’s film captures those fleeting moments of heartache and romance that only seem possible after hours, an intoxicating sense of possibility when everything is heightened in the dark.
“Toute Une Nuit” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
