Berlin Review: Charlotte Gainsbourg In ‘The Passengers Of The Night’
We’re back in 1981 — among placards, lapel badges and whooping young people. Fran?ois Mitterand, a socialist, has just been elected president of France. It isn’t a date that resonates much now — certainly not outside France — but the palpable sense of excitement in the opening scene of Mikhael Hers’s Berlin Film Festival competition entry The Passengers Of The Night suggests we are about to take a sweeping look at lived history.
On to 1984, with Lloyd Cole’s “Rattlesnake” playing over a carefree scene of two boys on bicycles; again, there is the remembrance of things not long past.
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After that, there is more of a sense of history abandoned as the story closes in on Elisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her children: university student Judith (Megan Northam) — whose interest in a broader world will soon take her out of the household to a communal flat, her activism barely discussed — and son Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter), an earnest, decent boy of 14.
Elisabeth is a caring, companionable mother who has never had a job. When her husband — acknowledged, but never seen — leaves her for another woman, she must quickly take on another kind of life altogether.
There are details of Elisabeth’s desertion that Hers gets exactly right. Her inability to eat, her renewed determination to cook, clean and nurture everyone else. And the nights she spends drearily, insistently awake, which leads her to the door of an all-night confessional radio show called “Passengers Of The Night,” where the presiding show host, a virago with the witchy name of Vanda (Emmanuelle Béart) gives her a job answering the telephone to talk-back callers. What desperate person, after all, would not feel better hearing Charlotte Gainsbourg’s silken voice on the other end of the line?
Enter Talulah (Noee Abita), a homeless young woman in post-punk torn tights with her world in a backpack. She turns up at the radio station to give an interview about her troubled life as a runaway. Elisabeth asks her to come and stay, offering her an attic above the family flat in a high-rise with a spectacular view across Paris to the Eiffel Tower. Talulah is one of fiction’s favorite fixtures: the stranger who appears from nowhere to change everyone’s lives. She comes, she goes, she returns. Matthias, inevitably, will fall for her.
Abita is a beautiful waif, with eyes straight from a Margaret Keane painting; Hers frames her like a magazine cover model of the era. He also asks far too much of her, both as an actor and as a character. As a character, her story remains obscure. As an actor, she cannot muster the emotional heft to convey her own tragedy — which we are clearly meant to apprehend empathetically — or a personality powerful enough to act as a catalyst.
What is most surprising is how little her presence seems to affect the family dynamic. She fits in. She doesn’t steal the silverware. And when she disappears, life just keeps moving on. Elisabeth gets a second job. Matthias gets a neater haircut — a hint that, like France as a whole, he is drifting away from the political left. As a story, it is a succession of episodes. Perhaps this is more like real life than any three-act drama, but it feels thin.
As always, Gainsbourg has a warmth and winsomeness that fills out Elisabeth’s flat character, giving it shape, charm and humanity. As the radio presenters realize, she can say anything and it will sound like a brook running over reeds, but there is nothing she can do to give a film about a time between two presidents the density it deserves.
Passengers Of The Night is at its best when, in an echo of Hers’ previous work, it simply shows us a detail: the evening light on the tower block windows, the streets at night with the sheen of office windows, the cemetery where the family meets up with Elisabeth’s father for walks. At those moments, we are in a real time and place.
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