Four Nights of a Dreamer

In his rarely screened second colour film – evocatively shot by Pierre Lhomme (Melville’s L’armée des ombres) – Bresson reinterprets Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights” by “focusing solely on the momentum provided by the reading” (Bresson), replacing the source’s neurotic interior monologue with pure gesture and a playful uses of sound. As a result, the master director’s retelling of the strange ritual between arts graduate Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) and the disillusioned Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) over four nights by the Pont Neuf emerges as one of his most musical, surprisingly tender and slyly humorous films.