Toute une nuit

TOUTE UNE NUIT   ***1/2

Chantal Akerman

1982

IDEA:  A myriad of couples meet and part over one night in Brussels.

BLURB:  Toute une nuit takes to another level the austere formal abstraction Chantal Akerman demonstrated with Hotel Monterey. Where that film used long, static takes to defamiliarize a building’s passageways, flattening them into their constituent graphic parts, Toute une nuit is guided by a visual principle of tenebrism. In an inky-black nighttime that sometimes confounds spatial orientation, splashes of light give shape to the contours of the world and its inhabitants. A shoulder or face is accented by a ray of chartreuse; walls, doors, and windows are adumbrated by strokes and swaths of teal. This shadowy nocturnal world of tenuous contiguity is the perfect host for Akerman’s elliptical (anti)drama, in which an array of anonymous characters come and go, meet and part, rarely seeming able to connect. Their perfunctory dialogue and abrupt dalliances are parodies of (largely) heteronormative romantic rituals, draining melodramatic emotion from scenarios where mainstream media has conditioned us to expect it. In the apparent paucity of meaningful, lasting human connection, Toute une nuit paints a vignetted portrait of urban loneliness as aching as it is glumly gorgeous, like a series of Edward Hopper paintings come to life. Akerman’s narrative minimalism and droll, deadpan refusal of naturalism can be seen in the works of contemporary filmmakers from Jim Jarmusch to Pedro Costa and Tsai Ming-liang, but her voice and style remain utterly unique in their attunement to an underworld of bruised human feeling.