After Jessica Forever already noticed at the Berlinale, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel we come back with a second feature film with the same English title: Eat The Night. An impressive slash thriller drama, navigating the boundaries between cinema and video game, which comes out these days in physical format. The opportunity to dive again, body and soul.
Living outside
Pablo (Theo Cholbi, already seen in Night of the 12th in particular) and Apolline (Lila Gueneau), brother and sister, live in a pavilion of peripheral France. She's a student, he deals to make some money, but what keeps them alive is to escape to Darknoon. An open world video game where they each embody an avatar and live a free existence that the real world does not allow them. A simili-World of Warcraft whose fate is sealed. Indeed, a message announces the final closure of the game in just a few weeks. At the same time, Pablo met Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé). While it helps with the disposal of its stock, it is mainly the beginning of a passionate relationship between the two young men. Yet their idyll is soon disturbed by the violent threats of a rival band...
Eat the night is a closed film. A lock-up in this peripheral France, where the pavilion areas mushroom, dumped between two islets of shopping centers. Horizon blocked. Sleeping hope. Staying is rotting.says Night in a conversation with Apolline. For them, elsewhere is inaccessible, like this python locked in a terrarium that will eventually die open mouth. Hope then drowns in a few impulses, like the last flashes of sparks of life that remain in them. Pulsions of violence ( Pablo's taser blow, blows, insults, a racism that is guessed latent), impulses of love (brotherly love, carnal love) and also sexual impulses. The nested bodies and moanings of Pablo and Night, rhythmizing a whole central third of the film, still show some budding life at the heart of this decidedly devitalized matrix.
And when the impulses no longer exist to shake these bodies and give them a semblance of life, they remain the synthetic worlds. Darknoon, this MMORPG invented for the film and whose long scenes fit into the feature film, which also opens through a download window. Eat the night would become the fictional counterpart of the documentary triptych composed by Rat Film (2016), The Cat, The Reverend and The Slave (2009) and A Glitch in the Matrix (2021). Three visions of the digital worlds, three visions of this unique escape from reality simulation to escape the harsh annihilating of the contemporary world.
Postbook blues
You've probably already felt it, that spleen throwing you wrapping up after finishing a good book. The book closes, the worlds that it has opened continue to spread, creating in the reader a strange dissonance source of melancholy. On one side, the death experience: the reader having opened the book is no longer the one who closes it. As for photography in the exciting by entering in the theme of photography (female), decidedly well present on our screens in 2024. The commonplace, to finish a book means to confront directly with the experience of one's own finitude. On the other hand, the implicit joy of the potential of thought opened up by reading, the infinite openness to other texts, other experiences.
What Apolline and Pablo are experiencing is this death experience multiplied by the hundreds and hundreds of hours of play spent on Darknoon. It is this postbook blues, multiplied by the scope of what the game represented for them. And Eat the night With a brilliance never borrowed of pathos to represent this sensation of sideration in the face of the tearing of these two characters. A sideration that tints the last third of the film with a deep melancholy, all the more striking as a strong emotional attachment is formed for this strange trio of broken characters.
A film that convokes Derrida and Proust without ever becoming intello-plumbing, a feature film that skillfully combines seventh art and video game, a film object stuffed to the heart of emotion, Eat the night shows once again what French cinema does best. Don't miss his physical outing to discover the (re)discover, and let's promise that this director duo continues on its beautiful launch...
Data sheet
DVD Region B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 103 min
Release date: 03 December 2024
Video format: 576p/25 – 1.77
Soundtrack: French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles:
But what a shame to deprive us of an HD edition! 😞
Yes indeed:/
Completely, I need to catch him up. Sebastien, if you're going through here, this review is dedicated! ^^^