Four Nights of a Dreamer

A film that takes place over four nights in Paris. Jacques is a painter. He sees nobody, works in his studio, and records the voices of women he has seen onto tape and listens to them. One night he sees a woman on the Pont Neuf. Marthe is standing on the parapet and is about to jump. They talk. She says she will come there at the same hour every night. From there the film divides into four nights. They meet on the bridge each night and tell each other their stories in turn. Marthe fell in love with a lodger. He promised to return in a year and left, and the year is up. Jacques falls in love with her. At the same time he helps to find the man. What the narrative is interested in is not love but waiting: the film stretches one person waiting for another across four nights and delivers the result in a single scene. The telling uses Bresson's known method. The performers are not professionals, the lines are read flat, there is no facial expression, and the camera looks at hands and objects. Paris is full through the night. There are pleasure boats on the Seine, groups playing music and crowded quays; the film sets that liveliness against the stillness of two people. The source is Dostoevsky's long story White Nights, with the events moved from Petersburg to Paris. The film was out of circulation for a long time and was difficult to see for years; it later became accessible again. Isabelle Weingarten and Guillaume des Forêts are in the cast. Robert Bresson directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Bresson's method and plain narration. Who it is not for: anyone looking for performance; the speech is deliberately toneless and that troubles most viewers.