Night and Day Review

Night and Day
Taxi-driver Jack (Langman) and his girlfriend, Julie (Londez), shack up and have lots of sex, completely cutting themselves off from the real world until Jack goes off to work the nightshift. They continue happily until Jack's colleague, Joseph (Negret) comes to stay. Julie then finds herself sleeping with Jack during the day and Joseph at night.

by Jeff Dawson |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1991

Running Time:

100 minutes

Certificate:

15

Original Title:

Night and Day

Odd couple Jack and Julie uproot from the French backwoods to settle, during the stifling heat of summer, in a rundown Paris tenement. All the better to allow the sullen Jack — via his job driving a taxi at night — to make an honest franc, and enough to keep these two passionate lovers in takeaway pizzas, consumed during the brief time-outs they take from their marathon bonking sessions. So much time do they spend en sac, in fact, that they have absolutely no social intercourse with the outside world and thus the seemingly earth-shattering event of a third character entering their lives — Joseph, Jack's fellow cabbie who drives the day shift — sends Julie spinning off the rails. And, before you can yell Up Yours Delors, she is merrily indulging in a spot of how's-your-father by night with the brooding Joseph, and — yes — by day with the unsuspecting Jack.

The theme of menage a trois is, of course, a staple of French cinema, and though the subject matter generally tends towards intensity and claustrophobia, Night And Day's moments of wry humour — such as when Jack's parents visit the apartment, coitus interrupting — and its brevity overcome the film's lack of dimension. When a ridiculously jolly Julie, cheerily grinning throughout, is, however, forced to make a choice between this pair of angst-ridden deadbeats, you can't really blame her for taking off before a nasty case of bed sores sets in.

When sex is the central theme of a French movie, which it invariably seems to be, it is normally in a more claustrophobic capacity. In Jack, Julie and Joseph's case, it is dealt with more humor, keeping what could have been a clichéd love-triangle drama,
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