Le Vent de la nuit (1999)
Directed by Philippe Garrel

Film Review

What is left when the dreams of youth have turned to dust and the urge to rebel has given way to a placid acceptance of conformity?  What is left is a languid night of the soul scented with melancholia and a bitter aching for release - at least this is what Philippe Garrel implies in his darkest and most intensely poetic film to date.  Adopting the well-worn conventions of the traditional road-movie, Le Vent de la nuit takes us on a long day's journey into night, towards the welcome abyss to which its three tortured protagonists are irresistibly drawn, like moths to candlelight.  Garrel hardly needs to resort to dialogue to allow his characters to express what they feel.  The sombre images, stark and eerily static like memories frozen in time, say all that needs to be said in this haunting existential lament.

In the tragically disillusioned character of Serge we discern a slightly mocking self-portrait of the film's author.  One of the most committed auteurs of the French New Wave, and one of just a handful that was still actively making films in the late 1990s, Philippe Garrel exemplifies an idea of cinema that has pretty well gone out of fashion but who refuses to go with the flow and sell out to the dictates of today's overly profit-conscious cinema.  Garrel is the supreme example of the film director as auteur and his films are as personal and idiosyncratic as anything produced during the glory days of the Nouvelle Vague.  The flame of May 68 may have long since burned out but its revolutionary fervour still clings to Garrel and his films, a sweet odour of defiance tinged with bitterness.

The influence of the more prominent figures in the French New Wave is readily felt in much of Garrel's work.  Le Vent de la nuit has a particular resonance with the later, more nihilistic films of François Truffaut, most notably La Femme d'à côté (1981).  The three main characters - Serge, Hélène and Paul - form a love triangle that nods towards Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962) - but they are also strongly related to identically named characters in the films of Claude Chabrol.  Paul (Les Cousins) is the half-hearted student casually looking for meaning in his life; Serge (Le Beau Serge) is the solitary outsider burdened with a lifetime of disappointments; and Hélène (La Femme infidèle) is the unfaithful wife who takes a young lover as a vital therapy to help her cope with the stifling tedium of her vacuous bourgeois existence.

The New Wave symbolism is hardly subtle but it doesn't need to be.  This is merely a set of markers that Garrel uses to direct us on his bleak excursion towards his own personal heart of darkness.  At first it seems paradoxical that Garrel, the least commercially minded of filmmakers, should cast such a high ranking diva as Catherine Deneuve in a lead role.  Yet Deneuve is herself the ultimate paradox - an actress with massive box office appeal who is herself a kind of auteur, willing and able to expose her soul in challenging roles for directors who are unlikely to be known by anyone other than the most resolute of art house audiences.  The film begins with Deneuve ascending a spiral staircase, looking as glamorous and aloof as any classic Hollywood diva you care to name.  But the ascent seems to go on for ever and as we watch Deneueve is transformed before our eyes into an ordinary middle-aged woman engaged in the most sordid of enterprises, an act of infidelity with a much younger man.   It's the most startling kind of striptease, a stripping away of lies and preconceptions to reveal the essential person beneath the fabricated myth.

Garrel exploits the paradox that is Deneuve perhaps better than any other filmmaker who has employed her and she becomes a powerful driver in the destructive intrigue involving the other two protagonists, both played with consummate skill by two other formidably talented actors of the French screen, Daniel Duval and Xavier Beauvois.  The contrast between these two is striking and effective, Beauvois's open-faced geniality rendering the dark solemnity of Duval's portrayal of a suicidal loner all the more disturbing and poignant.  Le Vent de la nuit ends with a cri de coeur that cuts through the spectator like a sudden, sharp gust of night wind, and for one fleeting moment we catch a glimpse of the sheer pointlessness of existence.  We live by day, but the darkness is never far from our thoughts.  With merciless restraint and the subtlest of irony, Garrel brings us into contact with the terrifying nothingness of our being.

Film Synopsis

For some time, Paul, a 30-something arts student, has been having an affair with an older married woman, Hélène.  The relationship no longer satisfies Paul, so he takes advantage of a trip to Italy to put some distance between them.  Whilst attending an arts exposition at Naples, Paul meets Serge, an older man with whom he has an instant rapport.  Not knowing that Serge is depressed and intends to kill himself shortly, Paul agrees to accompany him back to Paris.  For one man, this is a chance to become better acquainted with a country he has always loved.  For the other, it is a final pilgrimage to those places that have marked his unsettled life...