In four feature films and as many chronicles in suspension points, filming the mourning and the fragility of young people of today under a light retro veil, Mikhaël Hers (Amanda, This feeling of summerMemory Lane) will have never ceased to affirm it: of all the materials, it is wadding that he prefers. The criticism, of which Freed, was especially seduced by it. Although sometimes cooled, for the most refractory, by what could be described as an excess of creaminess, an enveloping hypersoftness which tends to consider the spectators as convalescents. An inclination pushed to its height in these passengers of the night, family saga running over several years of the 80s, and rebirth story of a single mother played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Damaged by a divorce, the one who has never worked in her life is trying to get back on her feet, under the worried eye of her adolescent son and daughter. The nocturnal radio program that furnishes her insomnia offers her refuge with a strong producer (Emmanuelle Béart), whose assistant she becomes.
Everyone is convinced of having lived, in his youth, the most beautiful period in the world. And it is his own that Hers revisits, or rewrites in this time capsule, where urban archive images rub shoulders with reconstruction. Dream wandering between twilight states, where the skyscrapers of western Paris are the backdrop, the film is the fleecy tribute it wants to be, capsizing on a ballad by Joe Dassin. You would have to look at it with a toe cover.
Formica interiors, yellow car headlights and the grainy warmth of film bring the blue to the soul of a dad in love, and of a young lost girl who has fallen from the gutter (Noée Abita, to whom the film ascribes a relationship with Pascale Ogier, a figure fixed in the Rhomerian firmament from his full moon nights and died at just 25). The character is exemplary of what, in the film, leaves a strangely sweet taste: even the darkness of a tragic heroin addict, attracted by the abyss, is diluted in an impression of immaculate prettiness. To the point of underestimating our capacity, and that of fiction, to absorb its shame and welcome vice, a disorder that is not only vague.
On the level of the family and intimate story, we will not take away from Hers this art of filming wavelengths between the characters, pulsations and tenuous enchantments which easily replace the slightest major incident. In terms of the collective narrative, the film is wrapped up in nostalgia: creating images of happiness brought back from the past does not exclude moving them or disfiguring them a little. Here, it is a question of lighting candles for them.