Customer Reviews

Toute Une Nuit [VHS]

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While far from my favorite film by Chantal Ackerman, I still find even her partly successful work worth viewing.

It's an interesting experiment, following over 24 different characters through one night in Brussels. It's a short feature film (about 80 minutes), so each character only gets 2 or3 `visits', each lasting from about 30 seconds to 2 minutes. We don't really get to know any of the people, so the challenge is filling in the missing pieces of their stories in our own minds. Some of it's quite funny, although keeping track of the stories can be hard. It's a film I didn't enjoy all that much while I was watching, but found oddly moving by the end. As in her earlier works 'Hotel Monterey' and 'News From Home', Akerman uses Edward Hopper like images of apartments and windows to create tone and mood.

I'd love to see better a copy than this now long out of print VHS. Perhaps Criterion will continue the wonderful work they did putting Akerman's earlier films on DVD. (hint, hint).