Nuits blanches sur la jetée (2015)
Directed by Paul Vecchiali

Film Review

Nuits blanches sur la jetée is the latest haunting work from Paul Vecchiali, one of the last surviving auteurs of the French New Wave who is still actively making films, more for his own satisfaction than for commercial gain.  It's a simple but beguiling piece that exemplifies Vecchiali's inexhaustible capacity to extend the boundaries of cinema and create new and meaningful forms of expression, yet it is based on an old and very familiar story.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1848 short story White Nights has already been adapted many times for cinema, arguably to best effect by Luchino Visconti as Le Notti bianche (1957) and Robert Bresson as Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971).  Vecchiali brings a new interpretation of the story that invites us to contemplate whether love really exists or whether it is an artificial construct we invent for ourselves to provide meaning for our otherwise empty and meaningless lives - the light we crave in the darkness we inhabit.

Even more than Bresson would ever dare, Nuits blanches sur la jetée pares back Dostoyevsky's story to its bare essentials, opting for an über-minimalist approach in which, for the most part, the camera is fixedly trained on the two principal characters who exchange large quantities of well-chiselled dialogue in the course of their nocturnal love trysts.  It's a film that demands much from its spectator but it rewards with its sparse lyricism and the subtly involving soul searching of two characters struggling to make sense of their feelings for one another and equate these with their own separate ideas of what love represents.  Needless to say, the film stands or falls by the quality of the performance from its lead actors, but in Pascal Cervo and Astrid Adverbe Vecchiali is twice blessed and their presence, to say nothing of the subtlety of their acting, provides the heart and soul the film needs to make it a thoroughly involving piece of art.

Nuits blanches sur la jetée is not a wishy-washy romance but one that almost revels in the cruelty and injustice of love.  Pascal Cervo's Fédor is visibly tormented by his amorous yearnings, which are not so much an infatuation born of desire, as a profound, almost spiritual need to connect with a universe from which he feels tragically detached.  His solitariness is underscored by his solo promenades, and you wonder if Natacha isn't just a figment of his imagination, the spectre of the ideal woman he has conjured up so that he can work through his muddled inner feelings and understand what love is and why it is so essential to him.  The mise-en-scène is brazenly theatrical in its simplicity but the imaginative use of lighting adds drama and impact to the almost mesmerising performances. It is with sublime elegance that the 84-year-old Vecchiali takes a familiar story and recasts it as a raw existential poem of extraordinary beauty and emotional power.

Film Synopsis

A young man named Fédor is spending a solitary holiday in a small port on the Côte d'Azur.  He idles away his evenings by walking alone on a pier stretching out into the Mediterranean.  This is where he meets Natacha, an alluring young woman with long red hair and a curiously distant aura.  Natacha is waiting for the man she loves to to return to her, as he promised he would, a year ago.  On consecutive nights, Fédor encounters the same woman and becomes increasingly drawn to her, certain that she is the person he has been searching for all his life...