the sentimental education of Mikhaël Hers

The Mikhaël Hers touch (“Memory Lane”, “Amanda”)? Probing the passage of time while making filmed locations, here the a priori surly architecture of the Beaugrenelle towers and the Maison de la Radio, characters in their own right, then bringing the emotion to a very high degree of intensity without ever sacrificing showiness. In “Passengers of the Night”, this seismograph of memory strikes a match on his memories of the 1980s to retrace in small steps seven years within a family cocoon.

Jubilation in the streets of Paris – Mitterrand finally reaches the Elysée. Grief plays at home: left by her husband, Elisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg), two children soon to be adults, the scars of breast cancer, must look for a job. She finds it at the switchboard of a nighttime radio meeting, a space of tolerance, of benevolence, animated, in cigarette smoke, by Vanda Dorval (Emmanuelle Béart in a very short role). And takes Talulah (Noée Abita), a punk teenager and vocal double of Pascale Ogier from Eric Rohmer’s “Nights of the Full Moon”, into her home, whom the young girl will soon discover at the cinema before disappearing.

Melancholic sweetness by Charlotte Gainsbourg

With loving patience, Hers gives breadth and breath to the crossed glances, to the moments in suspension, but also to the infraordinariness of two symmetrical sentimental educations, those of Elisabeth and her son, and to a blossoming – Hertzian and “Hersian” renaissance – against a backdrop of Joe Dassin. Elegant electro layers, sounds of the time, soft grain of shots shot on film, modest beauty of deep dialogues distill a charm that does not break.

The melancholy sweetness of Charlotte Gainsbourg, forced to mourn the loss of a first life, also has a lot to do with it: the actress accompanies “Passengers of the Night” with her very right note, in the musical sense of the term. Helps to coat it in its delicate and disenchanted matrix. Leave room for silences, give it its secret rhythm.

Trace of the spleen of a period when pragmatism had the skin of ideals, this sensitive film, a saga of our tiny lives based on imagination, resembles a shooting star on an overcast sky.

◗ Saturday November 1 at 9 p.m. on France 4. French drama by Mikhaël Hers (2021). With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Emmanuelle Béart, Noée Abita. 1h51. (Available in replay on france.tv).