A Whole Night

MOVIE #1,867 •🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿• 08.01.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM This is more than an exercise in patience. We aren't allowed to know these characters. They exist entirely as simpleminded creatures whose only desire is to leave the house at night. They range in age from children to the elderly. This collective impulse is the only thread. Individually, these never reach the level of vignette: they are but fragments. They end up at bars or on the street, milling about. The only connection is their shared desire to move from one place to another. There are a million reasons why. In total, 313 doors are open and/or shut. Sometimes, the door remains closed.

Even if they are all seeking something deeply human, I couldn't help but think of them as fish watching this film. The sheer volume of ‘characters’ seems to purposely negate or comment on that point. We never linger long enough to really care. I've never seen a movie where the inability to stay still has been so bluntly yet beautifully formulated. This is the slowest of cinema, despite the fact that the participants almost never stop moving. Aside from a pan here and there, the shots are mostly static but even when we see a couple lying in bed, unable to sleep, the tension and stress seems to carry that feeling of movement along.

Thundershowers come and a whole night turns into another day. With daybreak, comes a sense of stagnation. A man tries to write a letter but can't find the words and another boils coffee on a disgusting stovetop in his tighty-whities before manically pounding at a typewriter, a clatter that sounds like nonsense. No doors or windows are open or shut in the daylight. When a couple impulsively decides to go off to Italy, the woman immediately changes her mind. The film concludes with a different couple slow-dancing in a narrow hallway before a ringing phone interrupts them. You can find little moments like that if you're lucky, but there's no escaping the day. The lengthy cast list is displayed (fuchsia on black) over the same ominous drones from the beginning.

There is a push and pull between a bleak and a hopeful message here, one the director herself commented on in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma: “[viewers] divide themselves into two camps: some say it is a very sad film, others find that it gives energy, that it makes you want to go out, that it produces a kind of cocaine effect. When I see it, I feel that too: it makes me want to live strongly.” I think this is a remarkable film that is borderline experimental in nature. There’s something truly genius in how it takes what, at first glance, is a haphazard, ‘anything goes’ framework, and sculpts it into something steeped in so much beauty and meaning (however ambiguous, or subjective that may be). She’s either made something deeply complex feel simple or rendered a very straight-forward idea with layers of knotty, complicated interpretations. AKA the sweet spot. I think this is her best effort, at least to date. The haunting image of a child leaving home with a packed suitcase and a cat, and jogging off into literal blackness will stay with me for a while...


It's because we have nothing else to work with, no other context, that makes it so striking. Genius.

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⫷ MOVIE #1,866 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,868 ⫸

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Toute une nuit (also known as A Whole Night and All Night Long) is a 1982 Belgian-French drama film written and directed by Chantal Akerman. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Teddy Awards, the film was selected to be shown at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2016. It was released on March 15, 1982.