Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

December 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 74

Total Comments: 65

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Le vent de la nuit / Night Wind / The Wind of the Night / France / Italy / Switzerland / 1999

This contains the most emotionally raw and melodramatic scene I’ve seen in any Garrel film: Catherine Deneuve is in her living room listening to her much younger lover discussing literature with her husband when she suddenly picks up a glass, smashes it, and slits her wrist. Perhaps this is the contribution of one of the co-writers Arlette Langmann (Pialat’s wife and writer of a few of Pialat’s films, including A nos amours, based on her own life). But this is the one moment that raw emotion breaks uncharacteristically through, for there’s a very cool and measured tone to most of the film. It’s also more overtly beautiful than you expect from Garrel’s work, widescreen colour, with an interest in aesthetic effects (the play of colour: Deneuve’s red coat against the red of Serge’s car), a very different look from the more naturalistic J’entends plus la guitare, also in colour (rare with Garrel) and also shot by Carole Champetier.

Initially, Le vent de la nuit seems to be another investigation of Garrel’s favourite theme of the nature of love, with the intial concentration on a middle-aged woman shifting to Paul, her younger lover, another of Garrel’s portraits of his emotionally feckless self. But then the older Serge starts to form the core of the film, a representation of the failed ideals of the ‘68 generation, where suicide in the end becomes the justified response to the emptiness of the world.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
05 Dec 2006 9:42 PM | Submit Comment

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