Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971) (Patreon)

This is a Bresson film that doesn't get as much play as it should, mostly because it hasn't been restored yet. (Word is, it's coming soon.) But even while watching it, I wavered. Is this major or minor Bresson? Judgments like that don't mean a lot, but what I was really trying to put my finger on was, is this a rote application of the director's bag of tricks, or was he perhaps expanding the language here?

I decided this is in fact an important Bresson, but a strange one. In most of his best known films, Bresson uses editing and part / whole relationships to produce a self-enclosed, almost perfect world, one that bears only the most oblique connections to the world we live in. High modernist that he was, Bresson wanted to reduce practically every human action to its smallest iteration, to use film to achieve a kind of ground-zero of cinematic signification. How much do we need to see -- physically, spatially, and emotionally -- in order for a film to have meaning? By reducing things to their atomic minimum, objects and scenarios hit with renewed force.

So yes, that's the going line on Bresson, and I certainly believe it, even though I know others take issue with the fundamental premise. When you pare everything down and make a "perfect film," it produces a hermeticism that can alienate as many as it will seduce. Four Nights of a Dreamer introduces some formal aspects that will more obviously bear fruit in Bresson's last two films, The Devil, Probably and L'Argent. Like the latter, Four Nights is a stripped down Dostoyevsky adaptation, one that morphs the existential compulsions of his characters into images that seem inevitable in their purity. It is the dark side of Bresson's self-sufficient film universe, in the sense that the films follow a seemingly inexorable trajectory and the force of the images and sounds contributes to that claustrophobia.

But what's unique about Four Nights is the fact that, in several ways, it seems to foreground the problems of cinema itself, in a gently and even comically self-referential way. The organization of the central relationship into exactly four evening encounters, in four distinct parts, lets the viewer in on the work's temporal construction, letting us know exactly where we are at all times, the way structuralist films do. But Bresson also positions his two performers on a bridge above the Seine, never shying away from the picture-postcard beauty of light reflecting on the water at night -- a cinematic trope of romanticism -- but refusing to linger over it either.

We break away from this picturesque environment in two extended flashbacks that fill in the pasts of our two protagonists. Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) is a recent art school graduate who is working on his paintings, obsessing over the possibility of finding perfect love. He is a creature of semiotics, making paintings that turn women into colorful fields with thick outlines (a bit like Michael Snow's Walking Woman, actually), and waxing rhapsodic about how the ideal woman will respond to him and his adoration. Jacques continually speaks into a tape recorder and plays his own words back to himself, and this not only points to the process of mechanical reproduction, but to the young man's solipsism, his inability to break out of his own echo chamber.

He meets Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) on a bridge as she's about to commit suicide. He stops her, and she explains that she has fallen in love with a man (Jean-Maurice Monnoyer) who promised to return for her in a year but has not made good on his promise. In flashback, we see how she loses her virginity to this man (a boarder in her mom's apartment) mostly out of boredom and spite. But soon she realizes she loves him, and that if he cannot reciprocate, life may not be worth living. Her flashback displays a focus on walls and sound, listening between the rooms, and the eventual breach of her own door by the lodger. Like Bressonian editing, these two bodies are given meaning by having been kept apart; when they join, the impact is more visceral than logical.

The tour-de-force moment of Four Nights, though, is a comic interlude that, to my knowledge, marks Bresson's only real consideration of "normal" cinema. Marthe, her mom, and the lodger all attend a movie premiere. We catch a quick glimpse of the red carpet, Bresson style: women's legs in high heels, repeatedly illuminated by flash bulbs. And then, we see the movie itself. Some generic crime / gangster film, but presented as only Bresson can. Isolated hands point guns. Guns fire, but only the sound is heard. A man falls down dead with all the gritty naturalism of Hollis Frampton's "death" in Wavelength. Wounded, he tries to inch his way to a gun on the ground. His failed grasp at the weapon is the drama.

Seeing as this premiere is meant to be a date, Four Nights displays a bit of ironic humor. How, Bresson seems to ask, could true love burgeon while people are watching this? This preposterous facsimile of commercial cinema is like watering a plant with Roundup. Marthe's passion for this man is poisoned from the outset, making her obsession as delusional as Jacques' quest for storybook love. And the fact that the suitor comes back in the end, claiming his prize just as she had decided to devote herself to Jacques, is a nonpareil anti-romantic gesture. Four Nights of a Dreamer is Bresson's systematic formal delineation of that most frustrating of spaces, the friend zone.