My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days |
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“Want nothing. / Must nothing. / We’ll see? / The sea.”
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[Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours]
Director Starring |
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This is a strange film to watch on a whim, knowing nothing about it or its director, but so I did. Maybe it’s best to watch it with absolutely no preconceptions or expectations. It starts bizarrely, all unsettling camera angles and quippy, rhyming dialogue. After about five minutes I fell into its flow. Five minutes more, and I fell in love…
Forget the narrative: every summary I’ve read sounds absurd. Let’s call it a postmodern horror film, in which language — and the self we align with it — is deconstructed down to nothing. What begins with delicious wordplay ends up in spastic, monosyllabic utterances here lucid and revealing, there wonderful nonsense (thank you, thank you, to the translator who chose the verb “to smurf”). Delight as our once dependable bodies begin confusing shoes for gloves, crabs for brassieres, and finally into writhing, instinctive, violent shells. Love is hell, and what’s there to do once either concept is lost?
Or, put it this way. Any filmmaker who includes a dead dwarf bellboy holding hands with a 6-foot stuffed rabbit in a film knows what he’s doing. If you are looking for postmodern horror, that’s as good as it gets.
Or, fine, if you don’t want to talk Derrida with me at all, Sophie Marceau is naked in it a lot.
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[...] I doubt if I can address this film in my usual style. The best films — as the best emotional experiences, which of course encompasses the best films — are felt viscerally: this dead weight in the bottom of my stomach, this being wracked with chills, this inability to quite just get on with my day. It is actually a simple film, so what is there to write about. Longing, bereavement, miscommunication, terror, lust, and being utterly thrashed to death by love. These characters, deeply inhabited by these actors (and I agree with Tuco, the performances are astonishing; I agree with Romy herself, this is probably her best work), are not content to merely say “I love,” and find the active verb “to love” counter to mere survival. Georges Delerue has done this to me, too; his score is as haunting as that of Contempt. And while I have a vague fear I’ve already seen the two Zulawski’s I’m most apt to love (this and My Nights), I can’t wait to tear into the rest of his filmography. [...]
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