Mark Reviews Movies: ON A MAGICAL NIGHT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 7, 2020

Introspection about love and regret meets dream-like farce in On a Magical Night. Writer/director Christophe Honoré's film is a comedy, in which a wife and a husband are separately confronted by the ghosts of each one's past, but it's enriched by an air of melancholy for aging, things lost, the uncertainty of the future, and the suspicion that love is only a fleeting feeling. That makes it a comedy in terms of premise and execution, but it mainly keeps the whole affair from wallowing in misery.

There is just enough misery, though, for Honoré's real intentions to shine. It all starts with Maria (Chiara Mastroianni), a college professor in her 40s who has a thing for men half her age. Her husband Richard (Benjamin Biolay) learns of his wife's most recent affair when he prepares her clothes for the laundry and sees some texts from her lover. He confronts Maria, who packs up an overnight bag and heads across the street to a hotel, getting a room with a view into the couple's apartment.

Inexplicably, Maria finds a 20-years-younger Richard (played by Vincent Lacoste) in an adjoining room. They discuss what has happened—in between some fun in bed and in the bathroom, naturally—and start to figure out how and why things fell apart between Maria and the man this younger version would become.

Take the younger Richard, as well as a slew of others who visit Maria and later the present-day Richard, as ghosts or hallucinations or magical apparitions. It doesn't matter. Honoré is working in the mode of comic fantasy to get at the heart of this relationship and these characters.

Maria is scolded for her dalliances by her departed mother and grandmother, who appear from behind doors in the farcical French tradition. She also meets the embodiment of her will (Stéphane Roger), in the form of a popular lounge singer, and learns about Richard's forgotten depth of passion from his own lost love: Irène (Camille Cottin), his former teacher, who soon decides to show the older Richard what life could have been like with her.

Honoré provides no answers to the apparitions, because he doesn't need to. The focus of On a Magical Night is its questions—about love and sex and choices that echo for years and beyond. The answers to those matters are even more mysterious and unknowable.

Note: Strand Releasing is making On a Magical Night available via a virtual cinema release. You can choose to support a local independent theater (e.g., the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago) with your rental purchase. For more information and to access the film, click here. Participating theaters are listed on the page.

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