Chantal Akerman – Nuit et jour aka Night and Day (1991)

1. “Night
   and Day” (1991) by Chantal Akerman
   “Night and Day” is a film about the nature
   of human personal love – about the experience of loving which in the real life
   is only part of human amorous psychology but an essential one, the spiritual
   essence of love, as humans experience it. Chantal Akerman takes this sublime
   emotional undercurrent in human love, separates it from other aspects of love,
   more conscious and more philistine and even manipulative, and represents it in
   the film as love affairs between young newcomers to Paris, Julie and Jack, and
   later on in the film, between Julie, Jack and Joseph. The result is a
   film-poem, film-elegy, film-panegyric about purity and spontaneity of human
   love.

   Of course, Akerman is too a scholarly director to leave
   us with just a film-praise and film-adoration. While experiencing the film we
   start to feel the analytical streak in how the director has organized the
   narrative and images. Critical semantics joins the depiction of Julie, Jack and
   Joseph’s lives. These two and later three are gentle and innocent inhabitants
   of Creation. They are together like they are with the whole Paris, like they
   are with Creation itself. They are neither consumers nor possessors of love,
   they are participants in love which they feel as something like the amorous
   aspect of Heideggerian Being, and in the process of feeling themselves loving
   and in love they, as if, humanize Creation by transforming it into ontological
   plenitude which is touched by some kind of gracious melancholy of their very
   existence in love and through love.

   How and why spiritual mutations happen is one of the
   mysteries of human psychology. Chantal Akerman makes us see such a mutation in
   action when one morning Julie, after returning to her and Jack’s place after
   having spend night with Joseph and expecting Jack’s return from working night
   shift, suddenly felt an unconditional desire (which probably was silently ripening
   in her unconscious for a while) to leave her life, to live Jack and Joseph forever,
   never return to their places, to leave without looking back, to leave in spite
   of being… happy. She felt the necessity to run away from her happiness. Even
   genuine personal love (not to mention predatory marriages when symbiosis with
   marital and family ties functions as a surrogate for love and imprisons beloveds
   in the gilded castle of conventional “love” as a shining banner of social
   status), is not enough for an intelligent human being.

   “Night and Day” is one of the most gracious films among
   intellectual films. Its tender, intuitive quality and its gently insistent
   semantic perspective we’ll never forget. This film will always have p. o.box in
   our memory.

   By Victor Enyutin

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