Dreaming of Bresson

Cinematic holy grails are still possible, even in our stream-everything culture. And one of the biggest is about to land at New York City’s Film Forum for a two-week theatrical run starting this Friday, September 5.

Made in 1971, Four Nights of a Dreamer was the tenth feature written and directed by Robert Bresson, who many seasoned moviegoers will know as the French auteur behind Diary of a Country Priest (1950), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), and Au hasard Balthazar (1966). A handful of his later films — like Lancelot du Lac, his 1974 take on Arthurian legends; and his despairing 1977 youth movie The Devil, Probably — were less widely available until they were recently restored in 4K.

Of those later films, Four Nights of a Dreamer was the most elusive of all. Beyond occasional one-off 35mm repertory screenings and a muddy VHS rip of the film floating around online, it was nigh on absent. I was lucky to see it back in 2012 because I was living in New York City when Film Forum programmed a complete retrospective of the director’s work. Upon that initial encounter, it immediately became my personal favorite of his films. So naturally, I consider its re-emergence at that same theater in a gorgeous new 4K restoration (the last of his films to be restored) a cause for celebration. But there are more reasons to welcome this restoration beyond the merely personal.

Usually, when one thinks of Bresson’s oeuvre, one thinks of either spiritual subject matter or genre material treated in a manner giving it an unexpectedly spiritual bent. His stripped-down technique — particularly his direction of usually nonprofessional actors to emote as little as possible — is especially notable in the context of a film directly about religious experience, as the aforementioned Diary of a Country Priest and his 1962 film The Trial of Joan of Arc. But he also treated thriller material — a World War II prison break in A Man Escaped, the exploits of a thief in Pickpocket — with similar austerity. Many consider the results revelatory, with some thinking his technique evokes a sense of inner striving; others have expressed frustration with their deliberate emotional detachment.

In short, Bresson’s films are often considered uncompromisingly serious, which makes the relative playfulness of Four Nights of a Dreamer so surprising. That’s especially true given the tragic tone of its source material, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “White Nights.” In the short story, a hopelessly romantic man encounters a woman about to jump off a bridge. Over the ensuing four nights when they meet and get to know each other, she reveals why she wanted to kill herself: A year ago, a former boyfriend promised to come back to her, but has not done so. Given the lush, achingly romantic treatment Italian director Luchino Visconti gave this narrative in his 1957 adaptation of the short story White Nights, one might not immediately think that Bresson’s style would suit the material.

Dostoyevsky’s short story is told mostly from the man’s perspective, offering us a window into his inner monologue: one racked with a relentless yearning for emotional connection that can offset the humdrum nature of his own life. By focusing on the man’s headspace, Dostoyevsky allows us to draw our own conclusions about him as a person. By applying his usual near-minimalist approach to this material, including dispensing with first-person narration almost entirely, Bresson achieves a similar sense of psychological transparency, giving us the mental freedom to bring our own individual perspectives to bear.

That, however, doesn’t mean he chokes off the story’s romantic side. Pierre Lhomme’s cinematography gets into the spirit, especially in the brilliant ways he conjures up a vision of Paris in the evening as a kind of nocturnal wonderland. Rarely have reflections of street lights off the surface of the Seine been captured to such wondrous effect. And Bresson also stages scenes that stray from the narrative to give the film a looseness that fits its drifting characters. Most memorable in that regard is a musical number set on a cruise ship featuring a band playing a bossa nova tune. Combine that with Lhomme’s nighttime cinematography, and one may find oneself swooning in the moment, as I did back in 2012.

But there’s much more to this film than just its surface beauty, though. For one thing, he doesn’t shy away from the darker side of his male protagonist, whom he names Jacques (Guillaume de Forêts) in the film. The fact that he not only records himself repeating the name of the woman, named Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), but even plays that tape in public while hiding his recorder away in a jacket pocket, suggests an obsessive side to his hopeless romanticism. Marthe too shows something of a self-absorbed side. Even when he finally confesses his love for her and she gets swept up in Jacques’s passion, one gets the sense that she’s less interested in Jacques than in some distraction from her current disappointment.

Bresson, however, doesn’t so much judge either of these characters as chalk their foibles up to the follies of youth. Four Nights of a Dreamer is the work of a man who may have grown beyond the illusions that fuel his young characters, but who nevertheless understands their appeal. Indeed, to some degree, he exults in them. The genius of Bresson’s spare technique is that it is able to accommodate both wonder and reflection. It’s that kind of worldly wisdom that makes this previously hard-to-see, now glorious restored film worthy to be considered one of Bresson’s masterpieces.