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Philippe Garrel - Le vent de la nuit aka Night Wind (1999)

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Engr. Salahuddin

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Philippe Garrel - Le vent de la nuit aka Night Wind (1999)

A wayward young man (Xavier Beauvois) finds himself involved with two mysterious people of a previous generation. After an affair with Hélène (Catherine Deneuve), a married bourgeois who falls for the young student, the young man tries to escape her obsessions by setting out on a road trip with Serge (Daniel Duval), a taciturn, scared relic of the revolutionary generation of ’68. Criminally underseen in the U.S., this existential road movie by director Philippe Garrel ( Regular Lovers ) aches with the pain and passion of fragmented, personal memories. Shot in lunar color by Caroline Champetier (who has worked with Godard, Rivette, Straub/Huillet, and Desplechin), ‘Le Vent de la nuit’ is a spare work about the very personal weight of the past, the gulf lying between generations, and of the deep, mysterious undercurrents of loneliness, and human need.

This is one of those films that sorts the pseuds from the cynics. I am firmly on the former side. After initial groans at ANOTHER French movie about logorrheic sexual relationships (and yet another May-December coupling, although, happily, the elder in this case is the woman), one finds oneself wholly compelled without ever really knowing why. Because the content is frequently less than exciting - two men talking (or not) on a lengthy road trip; endless snakes of pristine Euro-motorway; interminable shots of a woman silently climbing floors of stairs, entering an apartment, getting it methodically ready for afternoon coitus (feminised Melville?).

Even when the content is beautiful - an overhead vista of a sun-parched Neapolitan town; an overgrown cemetery - the manner of filming remains detached. The camera often stops on a road or a wall, long after the human drama has passed by, or waits for a character to come into view, rather th an following her. There is very little of the editing that would draw us into the characters and their situations. Camera movements that break with the generally static style become heavy with their uniqueness - see the remarkable scene where Catherine Deneuve stares out the window; the camera follows her gaze, making it solid, pregnant, until it stops being a gaze, and we return to Deneuve, who is no longer looking out.

These two uglinesses, or rather excessive plainnesses, manage to create something very beautiful. I was reminded very much of the films of Manoel d'Oliveira - not just because Deneuve's ex-lover and daughter starred in his last two films. There is the same deceptively air-brushed, non-commital style that steadily accretes to become emotionally powerful. The image, in its unnatural cleanness, seems to be weighed down with nothing, to exist entirely in the present tense - and yet this is a film obsessed with history, the past, creating echoes and gaps in the present tense, through which seeps the emotion and subjectivity the distant style and performances initially forbid, like the traces of light that linger after a scene dissolves into darkness.

The film is a mystery story with the viewer as detective - we are given clues about each character, fragments of motivation and backstory; we have to sift the possible disparity between actions, what people think, what people say, and what people say about them. The film's mathematical structuring and patterning (especially doubling) does not prevent the ending being profoundly moving.

In many ways, the film is one of the stranger buddy-buddy road movies; we are never allowed get very close to characters who only offer of themselves piecemeal, yet the relationship between Xavier Beuvois and Daniel Duval is wholly engaging, so much so that you hope there are more roads for them to drive down so the film doesn't have to end.

Deneuve is the nominal star, but this is a very different Deneuve to the majestic grande-dame projected in the last two decades - frumpy, plump, lined, prepared to be humiliated to keep her young lover, knowing it will only drive him away. Whenever she appears, you just want the road movie to start, and she is conscious of this marginalising - when she brings her lover to her husband, she is even ignored as the hoped-for fall-out becomes a discussion about an obscure right-wing anarchist. A suicidal cry for help (a jolting, bloody, physical scene is such a refined film) serves to marginalise her from the film further, failing to break its masculine grip. (IMDB user comment)

Source: DVD rip by forestier

English subs by raulq

El viento de la noche
Paul, joven estudiante de arte, mantiene una relación con Hélène, una madura mujer casada con otro hombre. Paul decide pasar una temporada de viaje por Europa en el deportivo de Serge, un arquitecto al que acaba de conocer, que no ha sido capaz de superar el suicidio de su mujer.

Paul est l'amant d'une femme mariée : Hélène. En Italie, il fait la connaissance de Serge, un architecte et, fasciné par sa personnalité, rentre avec lui à Paris. Peu à peu, Serge se révèle brisé par son passé. Paul retrouve Hélène, perdue et en complète dérive. Après un voyage à Berlin, il présente Serge à sa maîtresse...