Nuit #1?s opening 15 minutes consist of one long, graphic, passionate, erotic, and strikingly real sex scene. The couple is Nikola? (Dimitri Storoge) and Clara (Catherine de L?an). They have met at a club and have come back to Nikola??s apartment for what, we can assume, they both know will be a one night stand. The sex in director of Anne ?mond?s gut-punch of a debut is a kind of overture. After it, we get two long soliloquies divided by a brief interlude that shows the man and the woman on the street in the rain, standing and wrestling, after Clara flees apartment in the middle of the night. Finally, we get a coda, Clara, who is grade school teacher, listening to her students read a poem. Nuit #1 begins with bodies and ends with language. That alone tells you a lot of what ?mond is up to here: an extraction of the meaning of an encounter.
After Clara tries to leave Nikola??s apartment after he has fallen asleep, he chases her down, setting up his meandering musings on sex, life, and love. ?Modern life makes me sick,? he says. ?Modern love makes me sick. Modern women make me sick. It?s like they?re men.? This could all come tumbling out like pages from a teenager?s diary, but ?mond?s script is too good, lean and candid, honest but unafraid to mix in a poetic flair. This isn?t how people usually talk ? or at least not this much all at once ? but for all its dim and smoky apartment realism, Nuit #1 is a kind of fantasy, satisfying the longing for taking two magnetic, yet closed-off souls and cracking them open like eggs.
Both Storoge and Catherine de L?an are extraordinary, particular in their pacing of all the dialogue, which sets emotions in motion and allows them to ebb-and-flow. There?s tension in what?s at stake, nothing less than an understanding of the meaning and purpose of an?individual?in the world, but also in how honesty and misunderstand can prick the ego and the heart. Nikola? is a failed artist unable to apply himself in the menial jobs he is forced to take. Clara is a school teacher who spends her nights and weekends losing herself in drugs and music and sex. Both, we come to realize, share one thing: a disappointment with life.
?mond doesn?t lash out or condemn the sexual despair we are confronted with, nor does she demonize fetish or desire, as, say, Paul Schrader might. Rather, sex, even in its so-called pornographic details, comes across as astoundingly beautiful ? even more so when Nikola? walks back through with Clara exactly what they have done together, detail by detail, droplet of sweat by droplet of sweat. We are confronted here with a vision of modern life that has left us adrift, lonely and grasping for meaning. But the film itself provides a kind of hope, hope in the way art and language can soothe by making some sense out of all the noise.
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