A panoramic, novelistic, decade-spanning portrait of a French family pulling together through troubled times, The Passengers of The Night (Les passagers de la nuit) takes a sentimental journey back to 1980s Paris. Under French law, it would appear that at least 30 per cent of all homegrown films are now legally obliged to star Charlotte Gainsbourg, and here she is again, in reliably nervy and anguished form as a single mother reeling from a brutal divorce and recovery from breast cancer. Written and directed by Mikhaël Hers, this Berlin competition contender is essentially a deluxe soap opera which starts strongly but never moves into high gear. Its attempts at social-realist grit feel as light as a soufflé, while its tear-jerking tone soon becomes as damp as a day-old croissant.
First and foremost, The Passengers of the Night is a love letter to the Paris of yesteryear. But this is mostly a cinematic fantasy of the city, where giddy young lovers jump into the Seine without consequence, junkies look like fashion models, and everybody chain-smokes all day long – even children, babies and dogs. Indeed, movie salutes are woven into the film’s fabric. In his previous Parisian drama Amanda (2018), which premiered in Venice, Hers appeared to pay subtle homage to the wry, poignant, discursive style of the late French auteur Eric Rohmer. This time he pays him overt tribute with a cinema scene featuring Rohmer’s bittersweet rom-com Full Moon in Paris (1984), which becomes a recurring motif in the story. Fleeting clips honouring Rohmer’s fellow New Wave elder statesman Jacques Rivette also pepper the narrative.
The Passengers of the Night opens with the election of President François Mitterand in 1981, a seismic political event that Hers subsequently ignores for the rest of the film. In her high-rise Paris apartment in the futuristic new Beaugrenelle district overlooking the river Seine, south of the Eiffel Tower, emotionally fragile single mother Elisabeth (Gainsbourg) is steeling herself to start seeking paid work again after years of marriage and motherhood. She mostly meets with crushing rejection, but finally lands a job running the switchboard at a late-night radio phone-in show hosted by imperious diva Vanda Dorval, played with an agreeably butch brusqueness by veteran French screen queen Emmanuelle Béart. Elisabeth’s work is poorly paid with punishing hours, but it helps rebuild her shattered self-esteem and, over time, reawaken her dormant libido.
Meanwhile, her two adolescent children, Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter) and Judith (Megan Northam), are slogging their way through school and college, classroom crushes and awkward first romances, embryonic career plans and budding literary ambitions. The trio share a warm, happy chemistry , until Elisabeth’s job brings her into contact with troubled runaway Talulah (Noée Abita). Taking pity on this lost soul, she generously invites her to stay in the family’s neighbouring studio apartment, arousing instant erotic interest from Matthias. Blessed with the beauty of a young Mila Kunis, Talulah must surely be the most stylish, impeccably groomed, healthy-looking homeless drug addict ever seen on screen. She is basically a Gallic Pixie Dream Girl, gatecrashing the main narrative purely to provide obligatory scenes of sexual awakening and contrived generational tension.
After this dramatically rich, potentially gripping set-up, what happens next is the big surprise: nothing much at all. The family plough on through the 1980s with their mundane lives, Talulah drifts in and out of the picture, new romantic possibilities open up, sweet memories are shared, and far too many subplots are left lazily unresolved. By its midpoint, The Passengers of the Night starts to feel less like a nuanced deep dive into Parisian domestic realism and more like a meandering shaggy dog story with no clear destination. In fairness, Hers generally favours Rohmer-esque lyrical lulls and quiet in-between moments over splashy melodrama, but the cumulative effect here eventually sinks into uneventful tedium.
That said, The Passengers of the Night is not a wholly charmless, hollow experience. Gainsbourg is always a magnetic presence on screen, her hypersensitive emotional antennae forever twitching on the edge of tearful breakdown. Attractively grainy newsreel and video footage of 1980s Paris is elegantly blended into the film’s rich visual tapestry, while a jukebox soundtrack of vintage pop tracks (Lloyd Cole, The Go-Betweens, John Cale, Television and more) provide agreeable counterpoint to Anton Sanko’s syrupy, twinkly, heart-tugging main score. But over the long haul the film’s gently preachy insights – everybody hurts, time is a healer, sharing is caring, sulky young men resent being friendzoned – start to feel like trite, anodyne, banal sweet nothings. Mainly because they are.
Director: Mikhaël Hers
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Quito Rayon-Richter, Noée Abita, Megan Northam, Thibault Vinçon, Emmanuelle Béart
Screenwriters: Mikhaël Hers, Maud Ameline, Mariette Désert
Cinematography: Sébastien Buchmann
Editing: Marion Monnier
Music: Anton Sanko
Producer: Pierre Guyard
Production companies: Nord-Ouest Films (France)
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In French
111 minutes
