YOU AND THE NIGHT **1/2
Yann Gonzalez2013
IDEA: A collection of people, all dealing with some kind of loss, come together one night for an orgy.
BLURB: In the liminal, deeply Freudian dream-space of You and the Night, archetypes are destabilized and primal narratives rewritten as a group of characters find release through the dissolution of boundaries. Ironizing the Breakfast Club-esque cast stereotypes, Gonzalez establishes a queer found family of profoundly fluid subject positions. From the fey maid Udo, who combines a godlike paternal omnipotence with sexual servility and maternal care; to the Stud, who represents a hysterical inversion of the role of the phallus as productive power symbol; to Ali and Matthias, who enact a gender-swapped Orphic narrative, the characters deform heteronormative roles, becoming bonded in a psychosocial structure where familial love and erotic intimacy are totally blurred. Although it’s self-reflexive and campy to the core, You and the Night is deadly serious about its characters’ emotional journeys, casting an earnestness over the film that at times dampens Gonzalez’s bawdy sense of play. What the film most excels at is creating a mood of hallucinatory atemporality, a cinematic purgatory constructed from fake backgrounds, deep shadow, neon color, and untraceable ambient sounds. It’s pure pastiche in the tradition of the New Queer Cinema, shot through with melodrama that attempts to reach the soul-churning heights of Fassbinder. You and the Night might not quite make it there, but its sense of renewal in loss, encapsulated in an anti-Orphic ending of trust and surrender set against a wintry sunrise, proves quite moving.