Click here to read the full article.
“I am a tone of voice, warming, shifting, pausing, changing, including, asserting, exulting, including, turning and including.” This quote by the poet Alice Notley opens “At Night,” British filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s
feature debut, which held its world premiere on Aug. 8 in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present program.
Gibson, who was a friend of Notley’s, took inspiration from the poet’s 1992 feminist epic “The Descent of Alette,” as well as Kathy Acker’s “Don Quixote,” to craft her story about a group of women crossing each other’s paths over the course of a single night in Paris.
Poetry doesn’t just open the film; it shapes the entire narrative. “[Notley] was always talking about non-compliance,” Gibson says, highlighting poetry’s ability to accommodate formal and thematic experimentation. In “At Night,” poetry appears in staged performances, voiceovers, and moments in between, as when we hear an off-screen female voice reciting a poem, then watch a character pause on a dark street corner to watch a video of that reading. In these instances, poetry becomes a sonic bridge connecting disparate characters, spaces, and stories.
“At Night” is anchored by the relationship between Bea (played by Gibson), a filmmaker on a location-scouting trip in Paris, and Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), who used to work with and for Bea. Their relationship has strained along racial and class lines; in one pivotal scene, they openly discuss the weight of these structural pressures on their relationship. Their tension allows Gibson to explore the “polarities and asymmetries,” as she calls them, that emerge from the “intersectional gathering of people” driving her project.
“I come from an art world context, which is kind of a privilege, because you’re taught to stay with the trouble,” Gibson says, about her decision to openly depict the power imbalance between Bea, a successful white artist, and Didi, a Black single mother living in emergency housing. For Gibson, the way to reckon with this disparity was to “make it a part of the film and not run away from it.” The film’s poetic structure broaches such thorny topics without rushing toward easy resolution. “It’s a film in the shape of a question,” Gibson clarifies. “It’s asking how to be inside these crushing polarities.”
Gibson describes “At Night” as a “collective autofiction.” Beginning with a voicemail from Bea to Didi, the protagonist’s subjective “I” broadens to encompass a larger cast of women. In one sequence, a group of women from various walks of life sit around a restaurant table discussing their experiences of motherhood and sex. Their discussion resembles the feminist consciousness-raising sessions of the 1970s, which influenced the structure of the film, particularly via Nell Dunn’s 1965 book “Talking to Women.”
It mattered to Gibson to depict women facing what would conventionally be termed a “midlife crisis,” but which Gibson prefers to call “midlife revelation.” “It’s a stage [of women’s lives] you don’t see represented that often in cinema, and it’s existentially fantastic,” she says.
If the language of poetry serves as the film’s structural base, its grainy analogue footage, shot by Ben Rivers, gives it the texture of a dream. One sequence shows a montage of Paris at night: an illuminated metro entrance, a corner shop with its shutters half-drawn, autumn leaves swirling across empty streets. In the quiet, we hear the whirring of the analogue camera. That sound underscores the physicality of the medium and heightens the sensation of time passing. “Shooting on analogue makes everything present tense,” Gibson says. “It’s not like digital logic, where you expect a distinct outcome. It’s about just being in space with these characters.”
Gibson’s focus on the particularities of her characters’ experiences is one way in which the feminist maxim “the personal is political” emerges in the film. But the notion also informs Gibson’s approach to depicting motherhood, a theme that occupies the center of the film while simultaneously existing at its margins: No children appear, but we watch as a woman takes a muffled phone call with her daughter or sends a late-night text reminding her partner to pick up baby food. The women in “At Night” experience motherhood in various ways, whether reveling in it, dodging it, or even grieving its loss.
“[The women] are escaping in this non-compliant, non-conformist way,” Gibson explains. “The characters are constructed to do things they shouldn’t be doing.” Bea’s character, for example, “temporarily [abandons] the nuclear family structure” to work on her film. When motherhood is no longer defined as a duty, new possibilities for female selfhood emerge. Through these distinct lives and their collective weight, “At Night” treats womanhood and motherhood not as fixed destinations, but as living, ongoing questions.
