Rubax Video - You and the Night (2013)

In a secluded fortress, young lovers Ali (Kate Moran, born in 68) and Matthias (Niels Schneider, Heartbeats) and their transvestite maid, Udo (Nicolas Maury, Let My People Go!), await the guests of a pansexual, midnight orgy — You and the Night is the playfully surreal, visually exciting feature film debut from acclaimed short director Yann Gonzalez, which made a splash at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Set in an unknown time that feels both nostalgic and futuristic, the lovers and their maid convene in an intricately designed living room, equipped with a “sensory jukebox” that plays music to match the feelings of the person who lays his or her hand upon it. The guests don’t have names; they have titles — The Slut, The Stud, The Star, and The Teen — and they each share their own bizarre tales of lust, fame, exploitation, and fantasy.

Also starring soccer-star-turned-actor Éric Cantona, Alain Delon’s son Alain-Fabien Delon in his screen debut, and the wonderful Béatrice Dalle as a lascivious prison warden, You and the Night mixes camp and sexuality in an engaging, unique style that pays homage to the work of Luis Buñuel, Peter Greenaway, François Ozon, and Jean Cocteau.

Consider the spectacle of Eric Cantona down on hands and knees in a police cell, wearing just pants and being savagely whipped by Béatrice Dalle while hard-faced prison guards' pleasure themselves. It’s one of many startling moments in this chamber piece of sex, surrealists and the absurd, like something by Luis Buñuel or Luigi Pirandello, or a sexed-up version of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. Cantona plays The Stud, who is legendarily well-endowed. Later, he’ll reveal what Dalle calls “the treasure in your trousers”, which might have made an interesting alternative title. Is it a prosthesis? Maybe. Stud is one of a mysterious group of people who gather in a room designed like an early-80s hotel lounge bar, and are revealed to have quasi-vampire immortality, kept alive forever by endless orgiastic sex. Their dialogue is a prose-poem of enigmatic yearning and melancholy reflection, with flashes of wit. One of their numbers is a beautiful boy sought by the police. A derisive cross-dressing maid greets officers at the door saying, pertly, that a “choir of missing boys” is kept in the cellar, but the public wasn’t ready for their first concert because it was “too avant garde”. The orgiasts are warned to never allow sadness to overcome the perennial heat of desire and pleasure. But it almost does.

Subtitles: English