Four Nights of a DreamerRolling Down That Hill: Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer David Heslin February 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Oh, if only you knew how often I have been in love … with no one, with an ideal, with the one I dream of in my sleep.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights1 There’s a strange parallel between the climax of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) and a pre-opening credits scene of his Quatre Nuits d’un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971). In the first, the eponymous protagonist (Nadine Nortier), upon whom numerous cruelties have been visited, repeatedly rolls down a sloped riverbank until she successfully drowns herself in the water below. In the second, a young man matter-of-factly does two somersaults as he walks down an incline in a field – an act of spontaneity that seems at odds with the more wistful, melancholic disposition that he presents through the rest of the film. One allows their body to slide towards nothingness; the other, towards a brief rush of feeling, towards something that, like life, won’t last. This countryside-set prelude, the only part of Four Nights of a Dreamer that takes place beyond the streets and apartments of Paris, both informs and provides a contrast to what follows. The freedom to hitchhike to a random place, carelessly climb over wire fences, walk along a path humming, as Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) does, is seemingly absent in the city for the people of this film. Both Jacques and Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), a young woman he meets on a bridge one evening – seemingly, like Mouchette, on the verge of drowning herself – have unhappily woven their own chains there. What binds Marthe is a once-promised, now seemingly shunned, reunion with a lover who has left to study abroad; for Jacques, as he tells Marthe on the night of their second meeting, it’s a kind of compulsive torpor, the product of an abstracted romantic fantasy. He sometimes nurtures this ennui by half-heartedly following random women in the street, elsewhere by solemnly delivering romantic fantasies into a dictaphone in his upstairs loft – a drab space dominated by the large canvases he intermittently paints.2 “It begins to seem to me,” the unnamed narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 short story White Nights explains, “that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the real.”3 Set in Saint Petersburg and written when its author was just 27, this is the story that serves as the source text for Four Nights of a Dreamer. The film marked both Bresson’s second colour feature and his second Dostoevsky adaptation; it directly followed Une femme douce (A Gentle Woman, 1969), also based on a short story rather than one of the Russian novelist’s more celebrated long-form books. Bresson explains that he “wouldn’t dare touch Dostoevsky’s great novels, with their formal perfection,” finding the shorter works he chose to adapt “simpler, less perfect, hastily composed.”4 Even if the author may not have been the most obvious match for a director known for his use of, per Mireille Latil le Dantec, “ellipsis and litotes, of economy of speech, of paring down,”5 in White Nights’ lengthy conversations there exists the threads of insular melancholy and transformative suffering that run through so many of Bresson’s films – for instance, in the purgatory that the story’s hero subjects himself to on a daily basis. In Four Nights of a Dreamer, filmed in August and September 19706 and released the following year, this “intermediate”7 existence is reflected in the city itself. Through daytime and nocturnal sequences alike, Bresson imbues the streets of Paris with a somnambulant quality, translating them into a place not so much empty as emptied of urgency. This feeling is particularly foregrounded in the film’s amplified ambient soundscape, populated by intermittent traffic noise, footsteps of passers-by and diegetic music that drifts in and out.8 Jacques and Marthe move through a liminal urban world, and in the process communicate a fragile romanticism quite distant from that of, say, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy, 1964) – more whispers than cries. This is not to say that the film is as chilly as some of Bresson’s more famous works. Describing it in the context of the director’s last seven features, Tony Pipolo declares Four Nights of a Dreamer “an unexpectedly bright interval between the three somber films that precede it and the trio of martial violence, suicide, and serial murder that follows.”9 And while the longing that develops between Jacques and Marthe is mostly chaste and emotionally repressed, the film does contain at least one scene of electric desire. Alone in her room adjacent to that of the lodger (Jean-Maurice Monnoyer) she has fallen in love with but hasn’t yet seen, Marthe strips off her nightgown and glances at her skin in the mirror, slowly moving in time with a plaintive acoustic song.10 This scene of self-seduction culminates in yearning absence: she approaches the lodger’s closed door and lingers outside, then retreats to her room, before he in turn does the same. By contrast, when the pair finally set eyes upon one another and consummate their covert affair, it’s treated matter-of-factly and relatively unerotically; the real thing can’t possibly live up to what has been dreamed. Desire, Bresson seems to be saying, thrives in absence, and in the fantasy it engenders. Absence, of course, is the natural and proper ending for a narrative that dwells so heavily in romantic fantasy. Falling in love with Marthe over the course of their conversations and offering to assist her in tracking down her paramour, Jacques begins seeing and hearing her name everywhere. His projection of his undirected romantic longings onto her proves infectious: as Marthe’s hopes for the return of her lover fade, her belief in her own love for Jacques grows. But this prospective happy ending is snatched away when, on a city footpath, Marthe suddenly encounters the one she truly loves and returns to his embrace. Both White Nights and Bresson’s film conclude with their young male dreamers alone once more, but seemingly enriched by the experience of loving and losing. Dostoevsky concludes with the protagonist gratefully declaring, “My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?”;11 Jacques, for his part, recounts what seem to be Marthe’s consolatory final words to him into his dictaphone, seemingly accepting what has transpired. Yet Bresson expressed surprise when confronted with an interviewer’s interpretation of this final scene “as optimistic, as an opening up toward life.”12 “That’s funny,” he responded. “For me, the ending is pessimistic – a less sorrowful pessimism, so all the more bitter.”13 But it is experience such as this, bitter or otherwise, that brings colour to life, that has the power to rouse one from a somnambulant state. It’s hard to imagine Jacques – or any other dreamer of his ilk – descending from this peak unchanged. Quatre Nuits d’un rêveur / Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971 France 87 mins) Prod: Gian Vittorio Baldi Dir: Robert Bresson Scr: Robert Bresson, based on White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky Phot: Pierre Lhomme Ed: Raymond Lamy Mus: F.R. David, Louis Guitar, Chris Hayward, Michel Magne, Batuki Prod Des: Pierre Charbonnier Cast: Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forêts, Maurice Monnoyer, Lidia Biondi, Patrick Jouanné, Jérôme Massart Endnotes Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1960 (1848)), p. 8. ↩ Bresson initially intended to use his own paintings in the film, but upon meeting the young painter Anne-Elia Aristote – who also offered her apartment to stand in for Jacques’ living quarters – instead elected to use her artworks, “portraits of faceless women, depicted in large swaths of primary color.” See Raymond Watkins, Late Bresson and the Visual Arts: Cinema, Painting and Avant-Garde Experiment (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), p. 92. ↩ Dostoevsky, op. cit., p. 24. ↩ Robert Bresson, quoted in Robert Bresson, Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943–1983, Mylène Bresson (ed.), trans. Anna Moschovakis (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), p. 214. ↩ Mireille Latil le Dantec, “Bresson, Dostoevsky” in Robert Bresson, James Quandt, ed. (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 1998), p. 325. ↩ See Bresson, op. cit., p. 211. ↩ “The Dreamer – if you want an exact definition – is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort.” Dostoevsky, op. cit., p. 15. ↩ Bresson expressly chose to film in locations, such as the Pont Neuf and the Square du Vert-Galant, where hippie folk musicians were known to hang out. See Bresson, op. cit., p. 213. ↩ Tony Pipolo, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 260. ↩ The track, “Musseke”, is performed by the Angolan-Brazilian band Batuki. Its lyrics refer to a traveller returning home to the embrace of their community, perhaps – as suggested by music scholar Luíza Beatriz Amorim Melo Alvim – mirroring Marthe’s own sensual longing for the man on the other side of the wall: “Quero o meu caminho claro, bem na hora de chegar. / E com um sorriso aberto, minha gente a me abraçar. / Ei, andei mar. / Ei, andei chão.” See Luíza Beatriz Amorim Melo Alvim, “Robert Bresson em ritmo de batuque,” ALCEU: Revista de Communiçao, Cultura e Politica, vol. 16, no. 31 (July/December 2015), pp. 104–5. ↩ Dostoevsky, op. cit., p. 56. ↩ Jean Sémoulé, quoted in Bresson, op. cit., p. 215. ↩ Robert Bresson, quoted in ibid., p. 215. ↩