My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days Reviews

Before watching this movie, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but I thought the title was pretty neat and it seemed to be a rather intriguing movie. First of all, I must confess that I never really liked Sophie Marceau. I mean, I’ll give you that, she was and still is pretty nice to look at but I always thought that she was actually a really weak actress. Well, with this movie, she had the opportunity to show something else about herself, something more artistic and compelling but, eventually, the whole thing was pretty much a failure, I’m afraid. Apparently, at only 18 years old, she met the much older Andrzej Zulawski and they would have a relationship for more than 15 years and this would be the 2nd movie they would make together. Basically, I think it was just a really obscure almost impossible to follow and really pretentious Art house feature. Sure, there was plenty of nudity and I always had a weak spot for Jacques Dutronc so the whole thing was not a complete waste of time but it wasn’t far from it. To conclude, I have seen worse but I still don’t think it is worth a look, except maybe if you really like the genre.

As pretentious as the obtuse title would lead you to believe it is. Andrej Zulawski's film appears like an attempt by a student of Bunuel to emulate Bergman after he had just watched Kubrick's "The Shining" as evidenced by the cavernous hotel location, bellhop ghost, and men in animal costume. I definitely appreciated the bizarre aspects which kept things interesting, like a guy sitting down in the middle of a city street to carry on a conversation with his agent, when he takes a bath fully dressed in his white suit, and the girl's wholly dysfunctional entourage. Unfortunately the main character played by Jacques Dutronc is so morose that he drains my willing spirit away with every utterance and pained expression. He also has a maddening method of speech, rambling off unrelated phrases in a word game only he can follow. Additionally, Zulawski posits that if you experience a childhood trauma, your adult life will be forever ruined from the scarring. Way to completely discredit the capabilities of the human psyche there. Thankfully the luminous Sophie Marceau is present to rescue the attention during the meandering scenes. She gives a captivating performance as a striptease psychic and has never been more naked on film before or since. Zulawski uses an intrusive amount of extreme closeups of people we'd rather be get far away from to make their misery our own, but the technique is sporadically successful like during a long emotional love scene in which the viewer feels intimately involved in the act to the point of discomfort.