Nuit #1

Two bodies, first in sexual motion, then in a dark stillness accompanied by conversations of previous grief and existential dread. It’s a subject explored before by Éric Rohmer and in a much lighter sense with Linklater’s “Before” trilogy. It’s a certain style of romantic trope in cinema history to focus heavily on interesting protagonists as they attempt to connect with each other, revealed who they are with brevity, jokes, and noxious nostalgia. Nuit #1, the first feature of Québécois Anne Émond, aspires to this lineage, taking us from a glitzy, sweaty club nightlife to a dingy, starving-artist-approved apartment for real-time, blunt sex until the title card announces the time for the sometimes illuminating, yet always sophomoric dialogue.

The “foreign” film, product of another world where people converse in odd dialects and act in peculiar ways. We need to be honest that the vast majority of films that most people consume every year are either American mainstream blockbusters or studio distributed independent (Sundance) films. There are of course, every year, a few foreign …