_On a Magical Night_ is the best and most innovative film by the
always intriguing Christophe Honore that I have seen. I am surprised
by (and dismayed with) the middling, damn-with-faint-praise reviews.
Many critics complained about the supposedly too familiar story
of infidelity among French intellectuals. They probably immediately
turned around and praise the artless _Marriage Story_, about New
York intellectuals, as a revelation! The definitive English languange
review is by Armond White, who highlights the falling snow and over-the-stage-wall camera movement as homage to both _The Dead_
and Resnais's _Private Fears in Public Places_. In one interior
scene it also rains dead leaves (or ashes), just to put a spin on
things. Ozon is referenced too. Much of the film takes place in a
hotel room, opposite the couple's apartment, above a movie theater.
Among the titles advertized are Ozon's _By the Grace of God_, which I
somehow didn't know existed, living under a rock at the time perhaps?
The young version of the husband character (Richard, Vincent Lacose)
in _On a Magical Night_ looks very much like the freshly scrubbed
teenagers of early Ozon.

The aggressive used of mirrors, reflecting surfaces, and crossing-
the-axis perspective-inversions signify the characters's intense
introspection, putting themselves in the marital antagonist's
shoes. This is especially true of Chiara Mastroianni's Maria, a
law professor who serially cheats with her students. She conjures
up husband Richard's youthful incarnation (Vincent Lacoste), who
viciously berates her in a vicious way. Her dead mother,
grandmother, and tens of boy toys soon join the memory lane
parade. It is her own guilt, her conscience speaking; so the
seemingly care-free Maria has astonishingly self-knowledge after
all. But she is no less disdainful of her husband's mediocrity
and lack of passion. ("Those are your best years?" she snears.)
Across the street, mediated by ghosts of his own, the adult
Richard (Benjamin Biolay) takes stock of his failures.

The film works as a inverted marriage with a stay-at-home husband
and a high-power, philandering wife, much like the Jessica Chastain
version of "Scenes from a Marriage." But it is an examination of
philosophical archetypes too. Maria is a libertine, an Epicurean.
From her point of view, not only are her flings and her lies
harmless -- living life to the fullest may be construed as moral.
Needless to say, this is usually done at the expense of others.
Richard once has his bourgeois morality groomed out of him by
his piano teacher and lover Irene, 20 years his senior. Lacose's
Richard is indeed fun and sexy. But Biolay's version has relapsed
into stoicism, if one can call his idleness that. He equates love
with memories of love. At the end of the film he makes up with
Maria, who is beautifully caught in a freeze-frame walking away
from him. He is still in love, but it is unclear his lack of
spontaneity will entice Maria for much longer. She keeps having
her head turned by golden boys walking down the street.

The most interesting character is Irene (Camille Cottin), who
appears to both spouses. She gives rich kid Richard lessons in
piano and love, the arts, and assorted sentimental education, only
to have Maria propose to and "steal" him. Irene is disdainful
of conventional morality and teacher-student taboos, but she
lives by her own code and freely chooses to cut ties once he
has married -- even if the decision destroys her. She is the
old-school French Existentialist, although few uses that term
these days. Cottin is a deadly serious, earnest, even tragic
presence, despite stRring in the comedy "Call My Agents." iN
one episode of that series Fabrice Luchini, playing himself,
coins the term "luscious reserve" to describe Cottin's
character's lesbian lover. It is such a quintessential
Luchini moment, you wonder if that isn't his ad-lib. The
same can surely be said of the mesmerizing Cottin herself ...

The two female leads are more similar than they admit; both
sleep with students. (The protagonist in _The Beautiful
Person_ loves *his* student Lea Seydoux as well). Honore
freely acknowledges the relationship taboo via Ozon's title.
He has dealt with much thornier stuff before (incest); the
extreme forms of passion inspire him. I wonder if the seaside
meeting between the women suggests they have a future together?
There are static camera work, hand-held sequence, use of
natural light, stagy interiors, Scarlatti piano sonatas
which suggest snow and indifference, pop ballads that stir
the soul. The inventive film has everything; it encompasses
the enormity of all human frailties and desire.

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