Chris Marino anatomizes Robert Bresson’s “Four Nights of A Dreamer” in today’s Romanticon. Bresson translates Dostoevsky’s early and romantic “White Nights” into another register, both Rilkean and Lacanian, in which love resides in the lack, the longing, and the ideal:

“In ‘White Nights,’ love is a harmonious togetherness, an experience of frictionless communication with an understanding other. Nastenka rescues the Dreamer from his reveries and teaches him this real-life truth, and the tragedy of the briefness of the Dreamer’s intimacy serves to underscore the value of such love. But in Four Nights of a Dreamer, we feel the raw power of amorous obsession, the agony of solitary longing. Love is a kind of inflammation that takes root in an individual heart, manifesting in the urgent demand to close the distance from an object of desire, its satisfaction offering a release into peaceful tranquillity. It is strengthened not by contact but by absence, by yearning, by purification into an ideal.”