Doors do not close – Newspaper Kommersant No. 185 (7386) dated 10/06/2022

Les passagers de la nuit (Les passagers de la nuit) by Mikael Ers is set in Paris in the 1980s. Mikhail Trofimenkov touched by no means the melodramatic vicissitudes of the action, but the trifles of life scattered across the screen of such a recent and such a distant era.

“Passengers of the Night” is good because the fate of the heroes of Ers – for all his muffled, unobtrusive, impressionistic and very human intonation – is not very interesting.

Yes, we can say that this is a film in the genre of “it’s never too late to start life over again.” Abandoned by her husband, Elisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg), about forty years old, who has never worked in her life, is left with her high school children Matthias (Quito Richter District) and Judith (Megan Northam) in her arms. And he was plunging into depression, because in a resume for potential employers he cannot report anything about himself, except that he “knows how to feel”.

The ability comes in handy: Elizabeth finds herself in the role of the host of a nightly radio show, a kind of public “helpline”. And while working part-time in the library, he also meets a wonderful man Hugo (Thibault Venson).

Another director would have used Elisabeth’s night work to bring down on the viewer a waterfall of urban dramas and tragedies that are banal in their cruelty. I would populate the soundtrack of the film with the unhappy voices of Parisians, who have no one to talk to. But Aers neglected this vulgar and unfailing trick. We will not hear any “passengers of the night”, except for the tongue twisters of one transvestite and one maniac, and thank God.

But in the life of Elizabeth and Matthias, the eighteen-year-old “passenger” Talula (Noe Abita) will settle for a long time, who came on the air to tell something super important about life, but did not squeeze anything intelligible out of herself. Talulah is a kind of “little Vera” who escaped from her native Saint-Malo from a crazy dad. Vulgar, lipped, homeless, defenseless, touching, incorrigible, sensitive. The fatal inability to at least somehow, even having hired as an usher in the cinema of the author’s film, to gain a foothold in life and the heroin future are written on her forehead.

What again does credit to Ers, he never takes a hysterical note – oh, the unfortunate, lost girl – taking any twists and turns of this or that fate for granted. Talulah gave Matthias the joy of first love – well, good. Disappeared from the lives of heroes, then returned, then disappeared again, it seems that having gone to meet her death, then so be it.

But Passengers of the Night is not a film about a sad first love in the same way that it is not a film about saving Elizabeth from despair. This is a great retro about the 1980s, the golden era of French history, in fact. About the years of François Mitterrand’s rule – the film begins with the Red Banner celebration of his victory in the 1981 elections – which gave society a sense of freedom. The fact that, in exchange for this feeling, society turned a blind eye to the monstrous corruption intrigues of the “Court of Versailles” remains behind the scenes, and the film is not about that.

It’s about people who, whether in the workplace or on the dance floor, smoke without taking it out of their mouths. About people who, with a clear conscience, hook up with colleagues in the night, such a new and mysterious building of French radio, without fear of being charged with harassment the next morning. About movies that play Bird, Paris, Texas, and Full Moon Nights, which young stowaways enter through the back door. About the era when mother and children danced in an embrace to the vinyl voice of Joe Dassin: “Et si tu n’existais pas …”. And the children did not wink behind their mother’s back: they say, the old fool went crazy. About the era when there were no mobile phones and a sex maniac called the beautiful radio host Wanda (Emmanuelle Béart) from street booths. About caramel pie, the reflection of the Eiffel Tower in the Seine, and punks hanging out under Parisian bridges. In general, about what was, was, but passed.