Le Vent de la nuit

Paul (Xavier Beauvois), an aspiring architect, is having an affair with Hélène (Catherine Deneuve), an older married woman. At an exhibition in Naples, Paul meets a colleague Serge (Daniel Duval), a former left-wing militant in the May 1968 movement, and the two drive back together to Paris.Their journey holds much more than expected, as they recollect the regrets of the past and the present of their checkered lives. An elegiac road movie, Philippe Garrel once again takes a simple, low budget conceit and proffers a profound work of art. Scandalously unknown outside of France, largely due to a lack of interest from distributors, Garrel has accumulated a body of work that incorporates over 20 feature films, most of which are met with critical acclaim and prizes from festivals such as Cannes and Venice. A genuine auteur, Garrel seldom veers from the issues of autobiography and politics, largely emanating from his involvement in May 68 and a radical drug fuelled past, which included a 10 year affair with the infamous Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico. Le Vent de la nuit is no exception exception to this rule, with the pensive Serge providing a vector for Garrel to ruminate on the fallen ideals of the past. Garrel’s films have been described as “the voyeurism of the soul”, and the film achieves such an effect through measured pacing and wonderfully subtle performances from the three leads. Although not a continual physical presence, Deneuve’s aura weighs throughout the film, as Garrel proves his ability to capture the ghosts, both dead and alive, that haunt us, a feat rarely achieved in cinema; the capacity to recreate the invisible in life, the things we carry with us everyday but cannot see, be they people, memories or regrets. John Cale’s hypnotic score provides the perfect accompaniment to the mesmeric journey. This is a contemplative film of high calibre and a rare chance to savour the transformative cinema of this unique filmmaker.