NIGHT AND DAY
With Guilaine Londez, Thomas Langmann, Francois Negret, Nicole Colchat, Pierre Laroche, and Christian Crahay.
And finally, after they make love, this closing exchange: “You must sleep, Jack. You’ll have an accident.” “Next year.”
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The musical-comedy-like rhythms of their dialogue are far from accidental. Roughly speaking, Night and Day is Akerman’s third and most successful attempt at capturing the feel of a musical–after Les annees 80 (1983), an inspired feature-length trailer for one, and Golden Eighties (aka Window Shopping, 1986), a charming if somewhat disappointing fulfillment of the earlier prospectus. This one succeeds in part because it’s less literal in this endeavor than its two predecessors.
Painting versus narrative. “Carl Dreyer’s basic problem as an artist,” wrote the late Robert Warshow in 1948, reflecting on Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, “is one that seems almost inevitably to confront the self-conscious creator of ‘art’ films: the conflict between a love for the purely visual and the tendencies of a medium that is not only visual but also dramatic.” This is the problem addressed in one way or another by each of Akerman’s features to date, beginning with her painterly, silent, nonnarrative first feature, Hotel Monterey (1972), made in New York when she was only 22, and her narrative and relatively unpainterly sound feature Je, tu, il, elle, made two years later.
Being Jewish versus being French and Belgian. Akerman is the daughter of Polish Jews who survived the Nazi concentration camps, and this background bears significantly on News From Home, Les rendez-vous d’Anna, and Histoires d’Amerique. Though Thomas Langmann, the actor who plays Jack, played the Jewish leading character in a non-Akerman feature, Les annees sandwiches (1988), and Guilaine Londez (Julie) has a physiognomy that suggests she might be Jewish, Jewishness appears to have no thematic relevance in Night and Day, and to all appearances seems as unimportant here as Akerman’s Belgian background. Significantly, however, Night and Day immediately follows Histoires d’Amerique, which is the most explicitly Jewish and, quite possibly, the least commercially successful of all her features to date. (Its critical reception at the Berlin film festival in 1989 was generally hostile and it appears to have had few screenings since then.)
