Malgré la nuit | 2016 Film Comment Selects Review

When the Night Has Come: Grandrieux Laments Lost Love

Seven years have passed since provocateur Philippe Grandrieux’s 2008 film Un Lac, and he remains somewhat of an acquired taste, though considering the subject matter, Malgré la nuit (Despite the Night) is surprisingly less galvanizing than his early features. The narrative, should we indeed call it thus, couldn’t be more simple, roughly concerning a British bloke returning to Paris to reconnect with his lost love. His reasons for leaving or returning aren’t apparently of importance once he disappears into a sort of Parisian ether, where passionate memories are pierced by a current state of abject degradation upon reconnecting with his troubled object of affection. The take away is more of a cerebral, extrasensory experience, existing as a diluted nightmare where pleasure and punishment are doled out in equal measure, which is hardly a surprise for those accustomed to Grandrieux’s filmography. But every moment oscillates wildly between extremes, every moment painfully aware of itself in such a way as to elicit our admiration even as it repels any real investment from an audience desiring to take the plunge.

Lenz (Kristian Marr) has returned to Paris to find his lost love, Madeleine. According to an old friend (Paul Hamy), she’s become preoccupied by one man in particular, though in a fashion Lenz hadn’t quite imagined. Once he reconnects with Madeline, he discovers she now goes by the name of Helene (Ariane Labed), and is hollow shell of the woman he knew due to the death of her child. Now, Helene absconds into the woods as a porn actress for a secret and brutal sex ring, engaging in violent episodes of S&M with a strange man (Sam Louwyck). Meanwhile, Lenz begins a tentative affair with an insistent woman (Roxane Mesquida) who is enraged when he won’t return her passionate fervor, which leads her to find out what the Madeleine/Helene fixation is all about. Lenz discovers he must delve into Helene’s insidious world in order to attain redemption for them both.

Filmed in languid, sensual takes, from plenty of unmoored, almost ghostly perspectives, Malgré la nuit is a hyper sensual experience, as indicated even from its intoxicating opening moments as Lenz appears out of some unknown void to inquire about Madeleine. While Lola (Lola Norda), the first person we glimpse, is a character never utilized again, Paul Hamy’s pimp shows up intermittently as an enabler of Madeleine/Helene’s current degradation. No explanation is given for her new identity (although it recalls the rival ladies of Death Becomes Her, affectionately referred to as Mad and Hel), but we learn, in one belabored conversation, of the death of her child as her rationale for entering into what plays out like a violent, S&M haiku. Her plight recalls the sort of fate reserved specifically for a Lars Von Trier heroine mixed in with the sexual underpinnings of Gaspar Noe, but Grandrieux’s film is less pretentious than Nymphomaniac and much more resonant than Love.

The screenplay was co-written by John-Henry Butterworth, Bertrand Schefer, and director Rebecca Zlotowski, though such an interesting mix of scribes don’t seem to have swayed Grandrieux from his usual aesthetic. DP Jessica Lee Gagne scores some highpoints, particularly an extended tracking shot of Labed following a confrontation with the troublemaking Roxane Mesquida, recalling Bruno Nuytten’s frenetic street shots of a despairing Isabelle Adjani in Zulawski’s Possession (1981). It’s a taxing role for Labed, who has jumped the ship from her Greek Weird Wave days for grand glory with idiosyncratic auteurs like Grandrieux and Guy Maddin, showing promise as a new fixture in challenging French cinema thanks to items such as this and Fidelio: Alice’s Odyssey (2014). Kristian Marr appears appropriately out of sorts at all times, while it’s forever a delight to see Roxane Mesquida, here playing another sexual/emotional terrorist.

Plot wise, there’s some similarity to Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), where George C. Scott aims to rescue his daughter from the sleazy porn industry. But Grandrieux’s woodsy sexcapades play as something much more primal, highlighting Lenz’s similarities to Orpheus from Greek mythology, while Helene and her dead child are reminiscent of Persephone and the damned pomegranate seed which keeps her trapped in Hades (apparently Paris is the stand in, the city providing the portal to Hell in As Above, So Below, 2014). Their undying love seems to bring them to a precipice of a torturous redemption, and perhaps they haven’t forgotten their naive vows to never scorn one another’s love. At the same time, Grandrieux makes it difficult to climb out of an apathetic trough for these doomed Parisians, who are never as compelling as the film is visually intoxicating.

Reviewed on February 24th at the 2016 Film Comments Selects Festival – 154 Mins.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆