Programme extension 1: Extérieur, Nuit by Jacques Bral
EXTERIEUR, NUIT - Jacques Bral, France, 1980
Special screening, Jacques Bral attending: Saturday March 20, 2010, 12:15, Rex 1
From one day to another, Léo (Gérard Lanvin) ditches his job as a publicist and his girlfriend, both of which bore him to death, and moves in with his friend Bony (André Dussolier), who has also quit his job and is now struggling to write a novel. When he meets Cora (Christine Boisson), Léo is first intrigued, and later moved by this strange freedom-loving girl and her husky voice who drives a cab by night, and who flirts with him before rejecting him. Freed from their social fetters, the protagonists drift from bar to bar and drive through the city to the sound of hypnotic jazz music.
Extérieur, Nuit first came out in 1980 and became a cult movie immediately. Jacques Bral, the director, shot only three other full-length films after this one, including Polar (1984) with Jean-François Balmer and Un printemps à Paris (2006) with Eddy Mitchell. In Extérieur, Nuit, he succeeds in capturing the Parisian night-time, as well as the spirit of the post-1968 era, with the disillusions of the late Seventies and the early Eighties. All these elements have been magnified in the present re-mastered version.
