You and the Night

If your recent Google search his­to­ry includes the terms ​“what’s the French for pork sword” and ​“Eric Can­tona tack­le”, you’ve come to the right place. Yann Gonzalez’s debut fea­ture is the kind of chintzy soft­core Euro­trash you might expect to come across while chan­nel hop­ping at 2am on a Fri­day night. If that sounds like an unfavourable anal­o­gy, it’s not sup­posed to be.

The scene is set in the ele­gant upscale apart­ment of a bougie young cou­ple (Xavier Dolan reg­u­lar Niels Schnei­der as the eye-patch wear­ing Matthias, Kate Moran as the melan­cholic Ali) as they pre­pare to host an orgy with their tiara-wear­ing trans­ves­tite maid (Nico­las Mau­ry). Join­ing them are The Slut (Julie Bré­mond), The Star (Fabi­enne Babe), The Stud (Can­tona, natch) and the Teen (Alain Fabi­en Delon). One by one the guests arrive and pro­ceed to reveal their ori­en­ta­tion, desires and weak­ness­es – Can­tona curs­es his unquench­able cock. It quick­ly becomes appar­ent that this is no ordi­nary sex party.

Replete with a ​“sen­so­ry juke­box” that pumps out puls­ing synth beats by M83, You and the Night is aes­thet­i­cal­ly and tonal­ly evoca­tive of a per­for­mance art instal­la­tion piece. Its dream­like stagi­ness is rein­forced by the behav­iour of this colour­ful ensem­ble who engage in light fore­play, demon­strate spray-gun orgasms and recall for­ma­tive con­quests and trysts via abstract flash­back sequences.

This is a film pre­oc­cu­pied with more than plea­sures of the flesh. Through the char­ac­ters’ end­less mono­logu­ing, Gon­za­lez con­jures a slow-burn­ing psy­cho­sex­u­al fan­ta­sy in which the sub­jects of love, lust and mor­tal­i­ty are unwrapped, stretched out and dis­card­ed like so many used con­doms. It’s a bizarre, odd­ly enrich­ing expe­ri­ence, even if it doesn’t always hit the right spot.