This magnificent British film from the late eighties seems to have been largely forgotten, though I cannot understand why. I would say that it ranks with Jack Clayton's THE PUMPKIN EATER (1964, see my review) and Jules Dassin's 10:30 PM SUMMER (1966, see my review) as one of the finest psychological cinematic dramas of the second half of the 20th century. It was written and directed by David Hare, who in my opinion has never received sufficient recognition for his unique talent, despite his numerous successes on stage and screen and the fact that Brenda banged his shoulders with a sword. Every aspect of this film shows genius. The lead performance by Charlotte Rampling as a Conservative M.E.P. of the European Parliament may possibly be the best performance of her entire career, despite all her triumphs over the years before and since. Michael Gambon, who plays Rampling's sad and disintegrating husband, was not yet recognised at this time as the towering figure he is now seen to be. But his resonant voice and impeccable performance here are clear signs of his work to come, especially the lustre he would later add to numerous Stephen Poliakoff productions. The story is extremely harrowing. Rampling plays a cold and ambitious Conservative woman politician, who neglects her child and is alienated from her husband, who is a Westminster MP. I have heard gossip to the effect that David Hare was not unfamiliar with such a woman, but whether or not that be true, he certainly has drawn a fine portrait of her, although an extremely chilling one. She is asked to take part in an important political and diplomatic meeting in Paris, so off she goes on that mission, from her family home in London. (We never see her in a European Parliament environment, and this film is so old that the European Union was then still called 'the Common Market'.) Hare gives excruciatingly accurate and unflattering portraits of the 'Foreign Office types', often called 'mandarins', of two countries, who generally manipulate all foreign affairs and toy haughtily with the fates of nations (or plot how to destroy them by merging them all in a continental marshmallow controlled by themselves, where voters count for nothing). Robert Hardy plays one particularly loathsome specimen, who keeps leering at Rampling and making anonymous phone calls of a suggestive nature to her, in which he says: 'I know who you are.' He has evidently got a whiff of some suppressed scandal in her background, and as the story progresses, we find that is all too true. Andrew Ray does a superb job of playing Michael Swanton, a former business partner of Rampling and her husband, whom they financially cheated in the past, and who has evidence of their early fraud. He has been blackmailing Rampling and turns up again in a state of absolute desperation. Much later in the film we learn that his reason for being so desperate is that he is penniless and needs the money for the education of his daughter, rather than out of greed, and that he is a pathetic figure rather than a sinister one. In fact, it becomes clearer as the action progresses that the sinister ones are Rampling and Gambon, who in the public eye appear to be paragons of public service and integrity. The moody cinematography for this film by Roger Pratt is truly superb, and greatly adds to the effect. He has taken the title literally, as so much of it is indeed by night, but a very imaginatively shot night which entirely lacks the usual cheap tricks of less creative nocturnal film lighting. I wonder if he is related to the Anthony Pratt who did the Production Design, which is also excellent. Even though the film has two Pratts, it has no pratfalls, but is even, controlled, and fluid throughout. The result is a powerful, sad, desperate drama, where some characters' fates are deserved and others are not. Not unlike Life, really.
Review of Paris by Night
