By the time Philippe Garrel made "Night Wind" he was no longer the young Turk who made "The Virgin's Bed", (or unmade it as some wags might say). Here he shot in colour and in widescreen and had a mature but still gorgeous Catherine Deneuve as his leading lady. Otherwise, it was mostly business as usual. What begins as a typically Garellian study of adultery, concentrating on the mundane rather than the erotic, (sex is conspicuously absent in this movie), soon shifts gear, literally as well as figuratively, and becomes a road-movie and Garrel's brilliant use of colour gives his film a much richer texture than we have come to expect.
Of course, the film must also be viewed as having large elements of autobiography in the mix. The central character Paul, (Xavier Beauvois), is, for most of the time, a passenger in the Porsche driven by Serge, (Daniel Duval), through Italy, France and Germany. Serge is an old revolutionary from the Paris of '68, and from the conversations they have about the good old bad old days you can easily discern the young Garrel. The older Serge may be the Garrel of the present as the younger Paul is the Garrel of the past and Garrel the filmmaker does not make Paul an easy character to like. As the older woman both men come to share Denueve is, of course, extraordinary and both Beauvois and Duval are also very fine.
If the film appears on the surface more conventional than we have come to expect from Garrel, don't be fooled; those touristy views of Italy are only part of the picture. As before, what interests Garrel is the existential angst bubbling beneath the surface. Garrel certainly likes to suffer and have his characters suffer so despite the luscious tone this is not always an easy watch. At times it veers close to self-parody but that's a risk I think Garrel was aware of and was prepared to take in a film that overflows with talk, all of it intelligent and some of it profound. This is the work of a truly major artist.
