450
JONATHAN BAUMBACH
cent film, had to wait more than a year after its appearance in the
Lincoln Center Film Festival for its brief, unpublicized run in New
York. The severity of Bresson's style has earned his films the reputa·
tion, depending on whom you read, of being exquisitely or preten–
tiously boring. In fact, in my sense of it, the opposite is true. There
is
hardly an uncharged moment in Bresson's meticulous and provocative
mise en scene.
My sense is that certain audiences experience Bresson
as boring because his films, while appearing simple, demand so much
of the eye. Boredom serves as a means of deflecting pressure.
In
Four Nights of a Dreamer,
it is as if Bresson's influence on
Godard had filtered back to him in a kind of circular pollination. A
comedy - which seems an unlikely move for the director of
Au
Hasard, Balthazar
and
Mouchette
-
adapted and updated from the
Dostoevsky story "White Nights,"
Four Nights of a Dreamer
is Bres–
son's most contemporary film in style and setting. It is also the austere
filmmaker's most ungrudgingly beautiful and accessible work. So the
new Bresson is a surprise and something of a disappointment to
his
admirers.
In the opening scene, the title character, Jacques, hitches a ride
to the country, takes two chaste tumbles in the grass, then returns to
Paris.
A
deadpan joke (like something out of a Jacques Tati movie ),
it establishes an aspect of the protagonist's character, indicating the
limits he places on the occasional freedom he allows himself. It is for
Bresson also a joke on himself, on the constraint and economy of his
method_ In making the dreamer also an artist, which may even be
at the secret heart of the original story, Bresson uses the Dostoevsky
tale as an occasion for a meta-cinematic fable.
When Jacques dissuades Marthe, a self-consciously melodramat–
ic figure in black, from jumping into the Seine, he falls obsessively
in love with her or, rather, with the idea of her. Significantly - it is
what makes the witch), girl so attractive to Jacques - she is
"in
love" with someone else. Jacques's life is at its most intense in
his
romantic fantasies which, narrated into a tape recorder, he replays
(narcissism within narcissism ) while he paints pictures of expression–
less women or lies dreamily on his cot.
If
Marthe becomes real for
Jacques insofar as he incorporates her into his fantasy, he, at the same
time, in telling her the story of his dream life, moves riskily into the
real world.
