Old sincerity – Weekend – Kommersant
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The film Passengers of the Night by Mikael Hers was released, telling about the European 80s as a time of long farewells and phantom pains: the main characters say goodbye forever to their former ones, and at this time France, which elected Francois Mitterrand as president, learns to understand in a new way “freedom, equality and fraternity” – not as a promise of paradise, but as an invitation to purgatory.
The Beaugrenel district, located in the west of the 15th Arrondissement, in the Parisian landscape, where every place is sacred with one or another cultural connotation, symbolizes the end of a beautiful era – the “glorious post-war thirty years” – and the beginning of a new life in which nothing is permanent anymore, neither history nor geography. Bogrenelle is built up with high-rise buildings and shopping centers – a utopian attempt by urbanists of the 70s to find a worthy alternative to the bourgeois existence of Ottoman living rooms. The attempt, of course, failed – today the Beaugrenel quarter looks like a reproach to socialism, which has already collapsed on all fronts. It is no coincidence that it is in Bogrenelle that the action of Passengers of the Night, an extremely melancholic film by Mikael Hers, takes place.
Elisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is about forty and has just been abandoned by her husband with two children. Meager alimony is not enough, and having never worked with anyone except as a mother, she is forced to “go among the people” – during the day to give out books to shy young men in the district library, at night to work as a telephone operator for the popular Radio France host Wanda (Emmanuelle Béart), whose show consists of conversations after midnight with compatriots suffering from existential insomnia.
In most texts about Passengers of the Night, this is not indicated, but Wanda, portrayed by Bear as a declarative emancipe on the verge of misandry, actually has a prototype – the legendary radio host Masha Beranger. Her smoky hoarse voice greeted those who do not sleep for several decades in a row in the program “Hello, Masha”. Berenger had frank conversations, often scandalous, with war veterans in Algeria, prostitutes from Saint-Denis, closet homosexuals, drug addicts, unfaithful wives, children who had run away from their parents, HIV-infected people, and other pariahs. Consciously forgetting about the rebellion of 68, France in the 80s faced problems – racial, class, gender – that required a revision of social conventions, including in the field of public dialogue. With her show, Beranger certainly changed the idea of the boundaries of what is acceptable in journalism, setting the fashion for the most, in essence, popular genre – confessional. What generation after generation calls the “new sincerity”, Berenger called the “vaccine of tolerance”, and her interlocutors – fellow travelers who found themselves in neighboring chairs on the way to an exotic country where everyone speaks the truth and nothing but the truth.
Night after night, watching Wanda, Elizabeth herself becomes more honest, she finally wakes up the will to live, in which all the same passengers: if one gives way to another, it is only out of her own kindness, and not because it is indicated so in the rules of conduct. Yes, and there are no rules (and the constitution is no exception), there are no instructions – either you want to live and get to the end of the night, seeing the day, keeping hope, or not. Everything else is pleasant, but empty lyrics that feed the library youths. And the world, alas, is not a library.
The beginning of the 80s, a time that often appears in the cinema as the dawn of a new life, has been described by filmmakers with bitterness in recent years. Mikael Hers is also trying to return to a place where no one was happy anymore, in order to understand: was it worth dreaming at all and don’t dreams always lead back to the starting point?
Passengers of the Night is, of course, full of nostalgic nods to the incorruptibles of Rivette and Romer, especially Full Moon Nights (1984), which opens with an allegedly old champagne proverb actually invented by Romer: “He who has two women loses his soul; two houses – he loses his mind. Quoting “Full Moon Nights”, Mikael Hers self-critically hints to the viewer: any nostalgia, any dreams about something past lead us to a fork, it is a trap. You only need to move forward, even if there is nothing but darkness ahead.
In theaters from 6 October
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