The other night the cinetrix was all ready to see Chantal Akerman's Les Rendez-vous d'Anna. Only problem was, and this is truly a tragedy, the one print in the United States had succumbed to vinegar disease or something equally wretched and was unscreenable. So, pinch-hitting was a print the Harvard Film Archive owned of another Akerman film, the singular Toute Une Nuit.
The adjective "singular" is not applied lightly. This 90-minute feature has barely any plot or dialogue. For more than half its length it moves from person to person, couple to couple, all in the grips of some sort of shared psychosis that sends them running into the night like characters in a 50s sci-fi flick fleeing an unseen menace. There's a lot of gleeful grappling and groping of the amorous variety, and time out for slow dances, but no real, how you say, story. It was kind of great, actually, once I was able to relinquish the narrative impulse and stop puzzling over how it all fit together.
Eventually the film does take pity on its viewers and make its way back to certain characters, tracking their progress and amours through the long night. There's sorrow and despair and melodrama on the overemoting level of a silent film. The way it jumped from one scenario to the next kept reminding me of Linklater's Slacker. Which brought me to an epiphany of sorts: Toute Une Nuit is like the movie going on around the characters in Linklater's solipsistic, hyperverbal Before Sunrise.
Work with me here. Both are set in second-tier Mittleuropa cities [Brussels, Vienna] and take place over the course of one night. Toward the end of Before Sunrise, the camera revisits the places that Celine and Jesse had talked their way through, showing them all empty of people. Sure, it's dawn, but it's an incredibly subjective, myopic view of Vienna as a setting for their night together, nothing more. But what if Linklater's camera had abandoned our chattering lovebirds to follow the gypsy fortuneteller, or the poet, or the students mounting the play about the cow? That's what Toute Une Nuit is like.
[And don't even get me going on the Jesse-Celine scenes in Waking Life and their connection to the bed-bound sequences in Akerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle.... When the cinetrix saw Waking Life in the theatre with a friend, we knew almost nothing about it and so squandered a lot of time waiting for the film to morph from animation to the live-action we could glimpse underneath. Once we realized it wasn't going to happen, we could give ourselves over to the film on its own terms. Watching Akerman's Toute Une Nuit requires the same surrender.]
