MUBI

“Night Wind” is either the product of a jedi-master filmmaker playing us in a game of cinematic chess, or just underdeveloped and lazy. I’m not sure. Either way, it has a number of very nice qualities to it, and has become somewhat unforgettable for me. Minimal not only in it’s story but in it’s camera movement in it’s editing, the film requires the beauty in it’s distance to be realized through patience. The characters offer very little straight forward information about themselves at once, and understanding them relies on the viewer’s ability to piece together what is provided. The human drama that exists is profound, and the stories conclusion is incredible. However, the word distant filmmaking is the key operative in describing Garrel’s approach and the film, as it left me desiring much more substance than was offered. Maybe that’s a sign of greatness, maybe not. Either way “Night Wind” has opened my eyes to a new stylistic sensibility in cinema, and for that I consider it a new favorite.

A wayward young man (Xavier Beauvois) finds himself involved with two mysterious people of a previous generation. After an affair with Hélène (Catherine Deneuve), a married bourgeois who falls for the young student, the young man tries to escape her obsessions by setting out on a road trip with Serge (Daniel Duval), a taciturn, scared relic of the revolutionary generation of ‘68. Criminally underseen in the U.S., this existential road movie by director Philippe Garrel ( Regular Lovers ) aches with the pain and passion of fragmented, personal memories. Shot in lunar color by Caroline Champetier (who has worked with Godard, Rivette, Straub/Huillet, and Desplechin), ‘Le Vent de la nuit’ is a spare work about the very personal weight of the past, the gulf lying between generations, and of the deep, mysterious undercurrents of loneliness, and human need.