Toute une Nuit follows dozens of mini-dramas that take place during one warm, muggy, thundery night in Brussels. Akerman's camera follows her subjects through the bars, apartments, restaurants and streets of the city she knows best, although she admits that in Toute une Nuit, unlike her other films, “I made something not too realistic...the English would call it fantasy.” The subject is love--the impulse that thrusts two beings together, the awkwardness and the exhilaration of contact, the desires, the disappointments.... There are many actors but no characters, and fewer than 100 words of dialogue. One Cahiers du Cinema critic called it a “comedie sentimentale treated as a choreographed dance.” Akerman injects her sly humor into the assemblage of fragments, as well as a strong emotional content--made stronger by the distance we are allowed from it--that characterizes her previous explorations of the gestures and postures of communication.