Eat The Night: Sex, Drugs and a Video Game
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Typically, films and TV series that purport to expose the state of youth (Larry Clark’s Kids, Sam Levinson’s Euphoria) tend to exploitation, moralizing while they titillate.
That’s not the case with Eat the Night, a French study in alienation and crime that depicts the relationship between introverted 17-year-old Apolline (Lila Gueneau) and her gay older brother Pablo (Théo Cholbi), a small-time party pill dealer.
The pair have grown up and bonded together over an online video game, Darknoon. With digitalized photographs of their faces attached to powerful and voluptuous digital bodies, this contemporary Hansel and Gretel conquer enemies (“killing a hundred figures a day, a thousand on a busy night”) in a world far more heroic and grand than their drab Le Havre bungalow.
It’s also the place where the siblings can best communicate, through their online avatars.
Pablo rides Apolline to school every morning on the back of his scooter and then spends the day making or selling pills. Maman doesn’t seem to exist, Papa is away on a long business trip and friends are non-existent. All Apolline’s joy and drama of life is wrapped up in the game. Shortly after she learns that her beloved game will soon be shut down in 60 days ending on December 21, real life comes crashing in.
The troubles start when Pablo gets jumped by the gang of a drug dealer, Louis (Matthieu Perotto), who doesn’t want freelancers on his turf. Following his beating, Pablo is befriended by a kindly grocery clerk named Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé).
Soon after, Pablo enlists Night in his plans to broaden his market, while buying a Taser to protect them from Louis and his goons. In the exhilaration of a victory over their rivals in a scrap, the two men become fervently busy lovers, hiding out in an abandoned cottage where Pablo uses as his drug lab, his pet snake in a glass cage a metaphor for life in the online world.
Her brother’s affair leaves Apolline without a real-world friend. In an empathetic moment, Night secretly joins the Darknoon in disguise and tries to become her Apolline’s confidante.
Eat the Night is the sophomore film from directors Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, who previously made sci-fi fantasy drama, Jessica Forever. The three principals are endearingly awkward introverts, and the film has a rich look, with the pulpy, detailed video game sequences (created by Lucien Krampf and Sara Dibiza) form a dramatic contest with the melancholy greys and blues of cinematographer Raphaël Vandenbussche’s palette.
As Apolline counts down the hours to the game’s closing, Pablo and Night’s criminal career spirals to new danger levels. The intertwined resolution — tragic in the real world, apocalyptic in the online one — is audacious if predictable.
Eat the Night, which debuted at Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar last year, has a ragged experimental edge. It’s jittery in its pacing, the characters thinly drawn, and the youth crime drama elements formulaic. (That gang of black-jacketed toughs perpetually milling around in front of the 24-hour variety store look like they might jump into a West Side Story finger-snapping dance.)
At the same time, the film feels emotionally original in its discordantly tender moments, whether it’s the scene with Pablo, lovingly instructing Night on how to mix and press Ecstasy pills, or the psychopathic dealer, Louis, soft-eyed and gentle he sits by his ailing dad’s bedside. The need to connect isn’t just for the morally scrupulous.
In empathy rather than judgement, the film conveys how the online game world (substitute songs, TV, movies, books or your favourite kind of popular culture) offers both intensity and a sanctuary and a chance to confront and slay the monsters of loneliness and anxiety, sometimes by the thousands on a busy night.
Eat The Night. Directed by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. Written by Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel and Guillame Bréaud. Starring Lila Gueneau, Théo Cholbi and Erwan Kepoa Falé. At Toronto’s Revue Cinema February 19; Carlton and Cineplex Yonge-Dundas February 21, and with other markets to follow.