Love is hopeless.

I know, don’t be too shocked.

But that is, in a nutshell, the parting words of Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d’un rêveur), depicting “pᴀssing ships in the night” and asking: Is love stupid? An illusion? An art form? It’s one of those contained stories that doesn’t work in any other context, but suspending your disbelief to see these characters as case studies delivers rewards.

Four Nights of a Dreamer follows Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts), a struggling Parisian artist who happens across Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) on the Pont Neuf one fateful night and stops her from taking her own life. Over the next four nights, they return to this spot to deliberate on love and attempt to reconcile Marthe with her estranged lover (Jean-Maurice Monnoyer).

Four Nights Of A Dreamer Is An Ethereal Picture Of Urban Loneliness

Four Nights of a Dreamer begins with Jacques hitching a ride out to the country for the day. Once he is in this idyllic rural environment, the entire trip is captured in a handful of sH๏τs: him playfully somersaulting in the meadow, singing as he cheerfully walks by a confused family.

This short story beat, ahead of the тιтle drop, is invaluable for how it contrasts with the rest of the movie, which is not laser-focused on the most picturesque scenes of Paris, but lovely in a subdued way. The opening credits, playing against the background of blurred city lights, were surprisingly breathtaking.

The movie primarily oscillates between the nighttime setting of a vignette at Pont Neuf and daytime flashbacks of drab apartments, illustrating urban loneliness, the City of Love being a distant and irrelevant idea. The camera also tends to linger on the sH๏τ of an urban scene as the character walks out of view, disappearing back into the city.

The music really pops with how it is interspersed over the silence, often through musicians diegetically coming onto the scene, one of the story’s motifs that highlights the idealization of love. Four Nights of a Dreamer has that old-movie feel that disconnects it from reality — just a bit — but the actors have striking moments as they sullenly wander and philosophize.

Four Nights Of A Dreamer Is A Layered, Understated Treatise On Love

The movie makes it clear through direct dialogue and recurring motifs that Jacque is the тιтular dreamer, falling in love many times, recording his poetic thoughts to play back for artistic inspiration. He falls for Marthe just as quickly, probably convincing himself that this one is different because he has actually had a conversation with her.

When the reality is that she is in love with someone else, and nothing can change that, despite that man’s mistakes. But who is Marthe to judge? She is actually a relevant mirror to Jacques. She knows her old lover even less than she knows Jacques, and is just as impulsive about committing to him.

A marker of its time, Four Nights of a Dreamer doesn’t take Marthe’s attempted suicide seriously enough, as it is merely the catalyzing incident to bring Jacques into her world. But today, this plot point prompts additional conversation, when it’s hard to believe that returning to a relationship the loss of which left her so depressed is good for Marthe or her lover.

Then again, maybe he was entirely faithful to her, and his delay was due to good old-fashioned miscommunication. But would Marthe’s relationship with Jacques have been any better? They declare themselves “in love” just as fast, and she spends the whole time talking about how she will move on from someone else if he can bear with her.

It all continues to go in circles. Bresson also apparently needed a supporting character we never see again to show up as the strangest house guest ever, soliloquize on modern art for a minute, and then leave, as a way to tie together all the themes — or just establish how pretentious artists are.

Four Nights of a Dreamer doesn’t entirely escape being weighed down by its characters acting as though they have no common sense, in their realm where everyone falls in love in two minutes. But 50 years later, the performances still land as a compelling lesson in the nonsensical state of ordinary humanity.