Toute une nuit

This lovely film might be Akerman’s postmodernist version of a city symphony, its beautifully paced rhythms and variations somehow “outside” the melody. It looks in on dozens of mini dramas that take place during one warm, muggy, thundery night in Brussels. The camera follows the characters through the bars, apartments, restaurants, and streets of the city Akerman knows best, recording the action with a sly sense of humor. The subject is love—the impulse that thrusts two beings together, the awkwardness and exhilaration of contact, the desires, the disappointments. There are many actors but no characters, and fewer than one hundred words are spoken. Cahiers du cinéma called it a “comédie sentimentale treated as a choreographed dance.”