Quatre Nuits d'un Rêveur

Director: Robert Bresson
Writer: Robert Bresson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (short story)
Cast: Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forets, Maurice Monnoyer, Lidia Biondi, Jerome Massart

IMDB

Consider a scene at the beginning of "Four Nights of a Dreamer" in which the young hero, Jacques (Guillaume des Forets), takes an outing in the country. All we see in Jacques thumbing a ride out from Paris, doing two straight-faced somersaults in a field of flowers, and, at night, stepping out of the car that has returned him to the city. The point is not that Jacques doesn't have a good time, but that the strict economy of gesture that conditions the Bresson universe requires no larger notation for this moment.

When a greater expansiveness is required, it will be supplied, but in recent Bresson films it has been carefully reserved for those fleeting indications of spiritual transcendence that have seemed his special interest in the cinema.

In "Four Nights of a Dreamer," it is more openly supplied, but it is no less special. The story, adapted from Dostoyevsky's "White Nights," concerns a solitary man, a romantic dreamer, who one night befriends a distraught young girl and for the next three nights meets her to tell about himself and listen to her story of what may be unrequited love.

On the last night the girl encounters her lost lover, and goes off with him — leaving the dreamer, who has fallen hopelessly in love, with only a memory for another dream.

Bresson has moved the story from Petersburg to Paris, from the 1840's to the 1970's. He has enlarged its scope, and—by making his hero an artist for whom dreams beget realities — he has provided something of a happy ending.

But although the dreams translate to art, their theme is love, and "Four Nights of a Dreamer" is very much a movie about the condition of being in love. The intense covert eroticism of the earlier Bresson (in all the films except "A Man Escaped", 1956, and "The Trial of Joan of Arc," 1961) is here overt and even lyrically sustained.

The effect on the film's quality is inescapable — not only in a superb purple passage in which the girl (Isabel Weingarten, another of Bresson's hauntingly beautiful heroines) examines her naked body, but in every private embrace and public encounter, in the sights and sounds that fill the city seemingly made for love.

Jacques becomes a slave to his passion. He carries next to his heart a tape recorder that in his own voice repeats the girl's name, Marthe, as if that were his heart's beating. But he has always been a slave to love, and even before Marthe, he has walked entranced through a Paris that is defined by its young girls' glances.

Jacques among the girls of Paris is a sequence that in its balletic purity directly recalls the great theft sequences of "Pickpocket," (1959), also set in Paris and also, in a sense, a study of an artist transformed by a woman's love.

But the new sequence is also very funny — not an achievement one usually associates with Bresson—and, in general, the theme of love has released not only the director's graciousness but also his wit, so that whole scenes together have an emotional complexity to match their deep, refreshing cinematic purity.

I doubt that "Four Nights of a Dreamer" is Bresson's greatest movie, but it may well be his loveliest. Time and again, it is shockingly beautiful, and I can think of nothing in recent films so ravishing as his strange romantic vision of the city, the river, the softly lighted tourist boats in the night.

Review by Roger Greenspun
The New York Times

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