a Cloud Maker

"Ce que je sens, c'est un immense découragement, 

une sensation d'isolement insupportable,
une peur perpétuelle d'un malheur vague,
une défiance complète de mes forces,
une absence totale de désirs,
une impossibilité de trouver un amusement quelconque".
-  Charles Baudelaire

You and the Night [2013]

by Yann Gonzalez

There ain´t very many alike, and that could be all that should be said of You and The Night; the whole picture revolves around a fairy tale like atmosphere, though crooked and dark in it´s core, talking dreamily and soothingly of blunt nightmarish awareness in a constant weaving of sweet and sower encounters, without the slightest pamphleting of moralist pretentions. In the end of the day, it´s like Charles Baudelaire himself had been blended with strawberry and sugar in a massive kitchen appliance. Everything on screen functions as pieces in a chess board, and that may just be, precisely, how Gonzalez arranged his game: with bishops, horses, towers and royal couples.

The characters - each of them - seem to be carrying a banner, parading their intentions and backgrounds as a war flag flyer in the very act of demanding respect - or simply.. to be heard or appreciated - out of genuine, though at times artificial, empathy. They are, each, vessels of concepts and not real people in deed, all standing for something in the fraction of the whole their fleshly bodies [together] compose. Teaching and being taught, loving and being loved, completed in their process by the over abundance of the other; for the orgy, here, is a metaphorical ritual very much alike, in meaning, the legendary cannibal rites of Amazonian´s [extinct] tribes: a fusion - or absortion - of bodies, for the sake of temporary completion, earned by the merit [and in this case, self-advertisement] on the part of the distinct one being devoured. 

What there abounds is misery; it being purged out of each other´s chest as they indulge into the ephemeral act of allowing love - immoral or not, judge you! - to take hold of their wheels for that given night. Now, what precisely dispels every shadow of - intentional - moralist or dumb anti-moralist preaching from this work is its ability to promote harmony between purity - mythological purity, mind you, as found in the many kinds of fairy tales, religious narratives and children´s bed time stories - and straight up satanic inferences, as perpetuated by [europeian] catholic priests all through the dark ages, in praiseworthy unison.

Litany to Satan:

According to the legend (given by film): a gipsy dark arts practitioner fell in love - in the purest of forms - with the legitment love sustained by a young aristocrat couple - and not necessarily by the individuals themselves, mind you.. - and waited patiently for a chance of somehow abiding the structure of that love by means of his secret knowledges and forbidden practices. That´s when the reference to french poet Charles Baudelaire - apart from the obvious deconstruction of the polarizing of  genders - becomes beyond explicit, as an ode to satan himself unfolds on the screen - or to more clearly specify the parallel - "A Litany to Satan", a.k.a. Mr Lucifer, just as in the author´s [in]famous poem[s] first published in a book titled "The Flowers of Evil" [1857]. Book which has been turning noses on different directions ever since it left the printing shop, - leaving us to ponder on how many noses this particular film has turned since its debut, for that very same matter -.

Baudelaire´s here mentioned poem is structured so as to overwrite Mary´s references - the Holly Mary of the Catholics - from liturgies directed towards her and/or to subvert other catholic canonical texts in his composition process. Now, mind you, that [hail] Mary, is holly [for Catholics and many dissidents alike] for being a mother, and that by immaculate conception - intercorse-less relation with the holy spirit of life - generating thus the son of God in her womb for the sake of bestowing eternal life to us all. It wasn´t by accident, therefore, that for a satanic bringing one back to life scene, Gonzalez, assembled up all of the above elements. Tempering - as a consequence - not only with the well known blasphemies of Baudelaire but also by being a satirical, though respectful, ode to the cursed poet himself in a inter-textual art that vouches not for turning its back on its ancestors.

Perhaps this conscious genealogy may, precisely, be one of You and the Night´s best welcomed feature, since it´s orchestrated into a classic cinema language but from arguably non cinematic art forms, per se. For when it flerts with theater and drama, it does it in a beyond explicit form - really wanting you to notice it is emulating one -. Beautiful and important shots are held in complete fake scenery, simulation of beaches and castles, for the sake of corroborating to the fairy tales and dream allusions it insistently - but not freely - projects. The plasticity of this picture is, as a whole, worthy of praise. Simon Beaufils, the expirient cinematographer of public acclaimed Les Intouchables [2011], created an atmosphere of dreamlike sensations [also] by utilizing cinematic cliches of the 70´s much alike Quentin Tarantino in his early films. 

For those expecting a load of cliches homed by traditional pornography [film] industry, there´s no much of such to be found. You and the Night isn´t  worried about bestowing futile rewards to its misplaced viewers. It, in fact, completely breaks free from any traditional exposition of sexuality, popular in films of its kind. The orgy, previously mentioned, is emotional only, the expositions - with the exception of Eric Cantona´s contribution, and of a particular dream sequence; but both being mature enough to break free from female body [or sex as a whole] exploitation - like wise. The real and only strip tease is of the film itself, going from a surreal psychedelic daydream to an extra naturalistic shot in its closing, stripped of all its shields as the sun rises.

This morphing of the supra-realism into realism is also important when we take into account the transition of the characters, the replacement of them, mind you, from the Baudelaire-ish Lover to the contemporary troublesome child as moon and sun alone could depict. There´s a fragment of Baudelaire´s letters to his mother that translates Matthias (Niels Schneider) whole purpose and existence in the picture time frame - and that may yet aid our contemplating of it -: "What I feel is an intense discouragement, an unsupportable sense of isolation a perpetual fear of a vague misfortune, a refusal - from the part of my strengths -, a complete absence of desires, an impossibility of entertaining myself". Matthias, in opposition to the Adolescent, is a misfit not only to society but to existence itself, he´s unable to perform humanity or rather the poetic things that compose it as such. The boy is, in a way, a reboot of him in this generation, with fixed bugs, a 2.0 Matthias reincarnated but not alike, as a day is always a day but never the same day, even tomorrow. An essay of the evil of the century and the borderline of bodies and beings. It´s like Gonzalez, in a hard to grasp fashion, have weaved a complex metaphor using multiple references and aesthetic influences to maximize a discourse that is ever so punctual and inspiring. Being metalinguistic and evocative as few of his fellow contemporary releases could only dream of being; for, here, in fact:

"Everything becomes Allegory"
- Charles Baudelaire   

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by T Augusto Pereira