Sick Product of a Sick System

good back-story, and good acting

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Revered for his minimalist approach to cinema, writer-director Robert Bresson shows an unerring artistic eye for his surroundings in "Quatre nuits d'un rêveur", though he stumbles with his vapid script (inspired by Dostoyevsky's short story "White Nights") about two young people in Paris. It's a flashback-heavy non-romance between a starving artist and a suicidal girl. After stopping her from leaping from a bridge, the painter finds himself drawn to the girl during an intimate conversation wherein they reveal to each other their past regrets--but she's still pining for her fickle lover. Bresson and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme capture lyrical, lazy bits of business--and sensual though not erotic female nudes--but the characters never take shape, and the amateur actors (a Bresson specialty) aren't compelling. ** from ****

Though one of Robert Bresson's lesser films, "Four Nights of a Dreamer" is perhaps his most influential.The plot here is simple: an artist wanders about Paris, observing its various female inhabitants. He loves these beautiful strangers, infatuated with the ideal they represent. He eventually meets Marthe, an attractive woman who is gloomy because her lover promised to meet her when he returned to Paris, but never showed up.The artist and the woman then spend four days together, sharing intimate stories and romantic gazes, but their relationship ends abruptly when Marthe's lover suddenly reappears. The artist then becomes disillusioned. The lesson: approach leads to destruction, there is no ideal, desire's can never be fully satiated and fantasies are fragile things. Paradoxically, they are precisely that which spurs man onward.7.9/10 – Though it lacks the polish of Bresson's major works, this little flick nevertheless set the template for later film romances such as "Once", "Before Sunset" and "Before Sunrise". With its long unbroken takes, loving shots of nighttime Paris, river ferries, street performers, musicians and a couple who "promise to meet up again in a year", this film laid the groundwork for a whole new sub-genre of romantic films. See too Minnelli's "The Clock". Worth two viewings.

I saw this film twice with Japanese subtitles. Tonight I saw a print (and very different version) with English subtitles. In this film, Bresson makes everyday life beautiful.... the lights on the river, the Brazilian music coming from a beautifully lighted tour boat going under the bridge the lovers are on... The story is small... An aimless artist prevents a woman from suicide and listens to her story and tries to help her reunite with her lover. This story seems to be seen through a dark filter of the beauty of Paris and its people. A scene where the heroine is making love in the next room while her mother is walking back and forth calling her name, not realizing that her daughter is right next door... Her voice gets louder and softer and louder...The scene with the aimless artist following one beautiful woman, only to be distracted by another beautiful woman whom he then follows....There are many small beauties in this film. And my telling you about them will only make you anticipate them with pleasure. Bresson, working with a minor little story has created a film of great beauty. Good luck finding it....I was fortunate enough to see it at a theater twice, where the beauty of the scenery could be appreciated. For some reason, it is not out in video or DVD. The DVD I saw probably had the photographer setting up his camera in the dark theater... and shooting at the screen!

An art-school kid meets a sad-faced girl on the Pont-Neuf; she's about to leap. It seems her beau left for Yale, swore he'd meet her one year later to the day--and he's blown her off. Love ensues between the couple on the bridge; Joe Yalie fails to make his appointment; and all seems to be heavenly for the two young lovebirds. Until, of course, days later, Joe Yalie comes a-callin'...The relationship between a painter's self-torturing love life and his efflorescent work life was explored with a riotous, blasting, punk-rock yet p**s-elegant glee by Martin Scorsese and company in the short film LIFE LESSONS. Bresson's version of a similar tale is, to put it lightly, less communicative. Late Bresson--from THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC on--puts a premium on mum's-the-word. But in a late, underappreciated masterpiece, UNE FEMME DOUCE, Bresson's deliberate muteness worked: this adaptation of a Dostoevsky story about a blinkered husband decrypting his wife's suicide prods at the question "What do women want?" with comic and sensuous tactics unseen elsewhere in Bresson. And the emphasis on the unreadable--made literal in Bresson's concentration on shoulders, hands, backs of heads--fit the material like a glove.The Dostoevsky source material for FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER is simpler stuff. And more psychological stuff, too--which, mated with Bresson's deliberately dime-store-Indian, anti-acting style, makes for incoherence. You can't make out just exactly what Bresson thinks this movie is about, except a touching, and not altogether lecherous, affection for Today's Youth. It has freaky asides, like his other unhinged youth movie THE DEVIL PROBABLY: an art student pontificates on his moral agenda for painting in a bowlegged scene that suggests Bresson standing up in the movie theatre and reading from a tract. It has bits of rock music performed live that take you back to the with-it-ness of Otto Preminger's SKIDOO. And it has the hero's weird, unfinished, Pop Art-meets-Matisse paintings, everywhere. And it ends with a sadder-but-wiser shrug.You get the feeling Bresson's heart and soul slammed painfully into every frame of this movie. It's also inscrutable and not absorbing in the least. Is this the fate of all master directors who make it to a ripe old age--they keep their chops, but they simply have no more stories they're impassioned to tell?