Slapstick on a dream landscape: love triumphs over reality in L'Herbier's tribute to the unconscious - and to movie magic. La Nuit Fantastique takes place in the unconscious of a worker, Fernand Gravey, who falls asleep and meets the woman of his dreams - Micheline Presle. For a dream woman, she is rather more inexorable than ineffable; she has the directed giddiness (quite appropriately compared to that of Carole Lombard) of a woman who, if bound to be trapped in a man's dream, is determined to at least choose the man.
The film abounds in papier-maché sets, magicians' lairs and foggy nocturnal dreamscapes. It reads like a silent film - harkening back not only to Melies (the early filmmaker and magician whose 1902 Trip to the Moon inspired L'Herbier) but to L'Herbier himself, who along with Gance dominated the silent era with stunning demonstrations of film fluidity. But La Nuit Fantastique, released in 1942, is a sound film, and makes all it can of that fact in dialogue that is provocative and disjunctive.
The film leaps about (lightly) on several touchy subjects for 1942; fear of imprisonment comes up in its images, and the question of who is mad and who is sane is asked repeatedly. But there is a horror of existence in La Nuit Fantastique that has little to do with any reference to the Occupation. The average person in a dream cafe is represented by a dummy, and the Louvre comes alive with frightening mummies; an audience at a magic show demands a corpse, for it is quite directly stated that there are no appropriate manners in a prison, or in a tyrant's den.
Freudian dreamscapes, magic and surrealism have all found an enormous potential for expression in film as far back as Melies. La Nuit Fantastique has all these elements. Like surrealist films, it is both playful and painful, but it lacks a surrealist commitment. It has more in common with Melies, whose emphasis was on the cinema itself: on the potential which the director/magician has to, with a wave of his wand, offset quotidian banality with the richness of “our daily dream.” (JB)

Note: La Nuit Fantastique repeated July 7.