Nuit #1

Though there’s no mistaking it for anything other than a narrow-minded bit of festival fare, Nuit #1 boasts a pair of striking lead performances that almost (but not quite) manage to compensate for filmmaker Anne Émond’s pervasively avant-garde sensibilities. The movie essentially follows two young adults (Catherine De Léan’s Clara and Dimitri Storoge’s Nikolai) as they meet at a dance club and retreat back to his place for a night of mindless sex, with the catch being that both characters subsequently have a lot to get off their respective chests. Filmmaker Anne Émond does a nice job of immediately capturing the viewer’s interest, as the movie opens with a striking sequence in which various revelers dance in slow motion at the aforementioned club. The film segues into a fairly tedious art-house drama, as Émond focuses on Nikolai and Clara’s robotic lovemaking vis-à-vis a series of far-from-titillating simulated sex scenes that seem to be occurring in real time. A palpably tedious feel does, as a result, begin to creep into the proceedings, and it’s not until the two protagonists begin revealing the contents of their respective personalities that the movie starts to recover. The problem is, however, that Émond forces these two characters to spout dialogue that, for the most part, sounds artificial and forced, with this lack of authenticity effectively canceling out the strength of the stars’ gritty performances. (It doesn’t help either that Nikolai reveals himself to be an almost epic douchebag with few if any redeeming features.) And although things improve demonstrably as Clara peels back the layers of her impressively damaged psyche, Nuit #1 has long-since established itself as an actor’s showcase that never quite packs the emotional punch that Émond has clearly intended – which is a shame, really, given that De Léan delivers a wrenching monologue towards the end that should’ve been a highlight.

** out of ****