Title: My Night (Ma Nuit)
Director: Antoinette Boulat
Language: French
Running time: 87'
Grief can definitely change someone’s life, the loss of someone we love is something that a lot of people go through and decide to deal with in different ways, to each their own. Grief can affect teenagers especially in such a way that they become distant from their parents, as they might feel trapped in a household that doesn’t understand them. They start looking for a new acquired freedom outside, and yearn to find some understanding in the people who surround them outside the house.
My Night (Ma nuit) tells the story of Marion (Lou Lampros), which starts on a really bad day for her: it’s the anniversary of her sister Alice’s death. And, when Alice died, she was 18, the same age Marion is now, a thought that technically presses hard on our protagonist’s mind. Marion’s mom (Emmanuelle Bercot) would like to honor this occurrence by having some of Alice’s old friends over, but Marion wants nothing to do with it. She leaves to go hang out with her friends and some new people she meets. People that somehow she automatically trusts, follows to a techno-infused party and that she later leaves there in order to wander alone the streets of Paris in the middle of the night. As she walks around the city, she gets approached by Alex (Tom Mercier), who at first she doesn’t like or trust, and dismisses as just the next guy trying to get in her pants. Later, he helps her to get out of a dangerous situation, so she starts immediately trusting him and seems refreshed by his “different” outlook on life. After a night spent through the streets of Paris, sharing their deepest thoughts, Marion follows Alex to his house and they end up spending the night together.
The movie seems to take way too much inspiration from Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” but without making it any justice at all. Marion’s character is just your average rude teenager, who isn’t processing well the death of her sister and takes it out on her poor mother, as if she hasn’t lost a daughter in this. She tries to act as if she was different from the masses, and she’s introduced as being passionate about photography, something that gets forgotten throughout the rest of the movie. The conversations she has with Alex are supposed to be deep philosophical conversations about the meaning of life and all that, trying to mirror Linklater’s dialogues but failing miserably, as the relationship between the leads in My Night doesn’t build up the same way it happens between the protagonists of “Before Sunrise.” We don’t really understand how, after Alex takes Marion out of the aforementioned dangerous situation, she immediately trusts him and gives to him the keys to her heart and mind (and, later, pants). There are also some continuity mistakes, as Marion has her useless camera over the shoulder in one shot, and in the next one she doesn’t have it all, or when she jumps into the Seine, we don’t know where such a fragile object might have gone, as later she has it again.
It seems like the goal of My Night was to make the next generation-defining teen movie, about the love story sparking between two strangers as they wander through the streets of Paris in the middle of the night, having deep conversations about the meaning of life, elaborating their grief. However, what it really does is to make us uncomfortable as we watch two totally unreleatable characters end up in each other’s pants. What this movie really needed was some more character work and a lot of better written dialogues.
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