PARTISAN REVIEW
451
Whereas in the tragic films, Bresson's isolated, self-imprisoned
figures (the curate, the pickpocket, Fontaine, Marie ) , seeking free–
dom, make contact at the last extreme with another,
Four Nights of
a Dreamer
deals with the romantic charge of hopeless pursuit. Jacques
loves Marthe - it is the nature of romantic love, of course - because
he is doomed not to have her. The dreamer, committed to loss, pur–
sues only illusory hopes. To make real contact, to love, is to lose the
fantasy of loving, which is central to the dreamer's life, the romantic,
really masturbatory stuff of
his
art. Although their romance is de–
pendent on the blindness of mutual self-dramatization, Jacques's loss
of Marthe, her rejection of him for her former lover, touches us some–
how at the end. Throughout the body of the film, Bresson denies us
the least of our illusions about his characters, distances us from them
as if a glass door separated our feelings from theirs. Withheld from
us unreasonably long, Jacques's pain and isolation - the price he
pays for
his
dreaming - breaks through at the last, releasing us into
brief recognition, and the film is over. Jacques retreats into old pat–
terns of survival, does what we've seen him do a number of times
before, but for a moment we see him with extraordinary clarity, rec–
ognize him as
if
he were transparent or luminous.
As
in other Bresson films, space and objects have more energy
and life in
Four Nights of a Dreamer
than the characters themselves.
What one remembers of the film are images like encoded fragments
of a dream. A beautiful glass-sided boat moving through a tunnel,
Jacques's hands and feet isolated from
his
body, drops of rain on
the outside of a window, Marthe's angular form in black cape and
hood, the empty space after a character has gone, Marthe looking at
her naked body in the mirror, Jacques lying on his bed in listless
rapture listening to the replay of his fantasies. Things seem unique
in
a Bresson film as if we had opened our eyes to their thingness for
the first time.
Four Nights of a Dreamer
is minor Bresson next to
Au
Hasard, Balthazar, A Man Escaped,
and
Diary of a Country Priest.
Still, you are not likely to see a more beautiful film this year.
4. Cries and Whispers
We tend, the evidence suggests, to be blackmailed by VISIOns
of despair as if it would be a confession of shallowness not to
admire wha t gives us pain .
J
ng-mar Bergman's over-praised
Cries and
