Movie: La Nuit Fantastique

[amedia]

La Nuit Fantastique was a French movie from 1942, very ethereal. The hero is a shy philosophy student (yay!) who is holding down two jobs and trying to study, and keeps falling asleep on the job. He tells his friends that he keeps dreaming of a beautiful woman in filmy white garments who leads him through amazing dreamscapes only to vanish. One night he dozes off at work and a beautiful woman in a long white gown goes past, so he follows her and has all kinds of strange adventures in which he acts with great dash and courage because he thinks it's a dream. We had never seen any of the actors before, but we really liked the girl's father (Saturnin Fabre), a stage magician named Professor Thales who chomped the scenery with style, and the hero's unfaithful girlfriend (Christiane Nère) who threatened to invade his dream when she heard about his "dream girl"--she was a spitfire. Of course there's lots of playing around with dreams and reality, as well as magic, drunkenness, madness, etc.

The French was very hard to understand at times; the subtitles were very helpful, although when we *could* understand the French, the subtitles were often a little bit off. "For the moral of the story, the villain must die," said the English at one point, but the hero actually said something like, "Pour la morale de mon reve, il faut que le villain soit puni" - "dream," not "story," and "must be punished," not "must die." C'est la vie!