It’s cinematic pointillism, with a cumulative effect that takes your breath away. Akerman\u2019s 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles <\/em>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\u2019re watching it. Toute Une Nuit<\/em> works in an almost diametrically opposed register. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes there\u2019s a cheesy Italian love long leaking out of the radios. It\u2019s 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\u2019s on the tinny radios indoors, where the characters sometimes dance. Oh, how they dance \u2013 clutching each other close and flinging themselves around as if their lives depended on it. The bits and pieces of dialogue are evocative enough \u2013 or banal enough \u2013 for us to fill in the blanks on our own. \u201cHow can you love him?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t think we still love each other,\u201d and the movie\u2019s most oft-repeated utterance: \u201cCome.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s no sex and very little in the way of kissing. The movie\u2019s romantic gestures are either too grand or too defeated for conventional lip-locks or any rumpy-pumpy. It\u2019s 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 <\/em>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\u2019s 91 minutes, settling into a mood that\u2019s quieter and more reflective before dissipating into the cold light of day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Talking to the BFI\u2019s Sight and Sound<\/em> magazine<\/a> in 1984, Akerman admitted that she didn\u2019t 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. \u201cI think the night is very much like a set \u2013 it\u2019s black,\u201d she explained<\/a>. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some guy from New Jersey once sang that we should show a little faith because there\u2019s magic in the night. Akerman\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Toute Une Nuit” is streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Toute-Une-Nuit-1024x576.jpg\")
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