Four Nights (Scout Tafoya, 2023) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Scout Tafoya

Dear Scout,

Please excuse the possibly cloying approach of discussing your film in epistolary form rather than a conventional review. This is mostly my way of mitigating the awkwardness of writing about a film when I know its maker, and when (as was the case with Frederic Da and Maximilien Luc Procter) the maker is a subscriber and will be reading what I write fairly soon after I post it. Plus, in a very real sense, these remarks are addressed to you, since, at my prompting, you requested that I write about one of your films.

I am woefully unschooled in the ways of the Honors Zombie. The only film of yours I'd seen previously was your seemingly atypical Michael Snow tribute, which itself felt a bit like a personal missive. I should specify, I have not been avoiding your films. But I do tend to get swamped, falling behind, and I'll admit that when it comes to friends and their films, that bugs me even more than usual -- like an unreturned email writ large. Plus, let's face it, I'm not the biggest grindhouse aficionado, and it seems that a number of your works at least flirt with that genre. Maybe I'm totally wrong.

In light of all that, it makes sense that you'd ask me to have a look at Four Nights, which is clearly more indebted to the subgenre of woman-centered identity swap movies: Persona, of course, 3 Women, Mulholland Drive, and the like. You mentioned in your request message that Losey was on your mind when making Four Nights. Sadly, I barely know Losey at all -- a huge omission. The only two films of his I've seen are his M remake and The Boy With Green Hair. Are those atypical? I'm guessing they might be.

Judging from certain aspects of the "print" you sent me, especially the uneven sound mix, I suspect you are not 100% finished with this film. Is that right? Certain elements jumped out at me and at first I thought they were uncorrected production artifacts but soon decided they were intentional effects. I'm thinking of the juddering image that happens on the beach a few times, like a video transfer glitch. There were also some shots, especially inside the house, I thought may not have been color-corrected, but now I'm thinking you were going for a foggy, blanched image of diffused white light. Interesting choices, in part because they appear only intermittently, so it leaves the question open as to how committed you are to them.

Okay, so let's get to it. I liked what Four Nights was attempting quite a bit more than I like what it actually does. What's most interesting in this regard is how you shift to a radically different style in the last twenty minutes, when Kitty (Stephanie Lavardera) shows up at Bel's (Emily Crovella) place. It becomes more realistic, more straightforward, and retroactively shows us just how much of the preceding film was deeply inside Bel's head. The writing is more natural, and so is the acting to an extent, but I still feel that Crovella's line readings are too mannered and theatrical. Lavardera (who I initially thought was Michelle Siracusa in a different guise - more on that in a second) provides the strongest overall performance, because she manages to convey a personality and a history that is not circumscribed by the events of the film. In short, she exists.

My difficulties with Crovella's performance -- as well as those of Joseph Merlo and to a lesser extent Alexa Lynn Sepede, who are following Crovella's tonal lead -- mostly pertain to the awkward pitch between emotive realism and stylization. In certain respects, I think Four Nights might work better on the stage. The stilted elocution would seem more at home there, since there is an automatic de-realization that occurs even in the most naturalistic piece of theater. The stage induces a distance that, to a great extent, cinema sutures up. And -- purely personal problem here -- Crovella's presence kept reminding me of Deragh Campbell, someone who has established her own form of neo-Brechtian acting that travels with her from film to film and role to role. 

But more to the point, Bel spends so much of the film with her other personae as her interlocutors that, as a viewer, it is hard for me to understand whether I am watching something that means to mimic intersubjectivity. Are these psychotic voices? Alternate personalities? Memories of actual people? At one point I got the idea that Errol was Bel's father, and that perhaps Phaedra was Felicity's mother? I appreciate that you don't solve these mysteries, but it seems like you drop breadcrumbs to lead us to conclusions that don't really matter in the larger scheme of the movie you're making. So it can be a bit of a distraction.

And about those long segments of Bel "alone" with Phaedra and Errol... There is a single writerly tone, a very specific cadence and vocabulary, that defines these segments so thoroughly that it really disinclines us to see them as characters. I mean, there is a tradition of filmmakers who prefer making all their characters have the same voice -- often their own -- but that in itself entails a certain abstraction that, in my opinion, doesn't go far enough here. I kept thinking of Bakhtin and his "Discourse in the Novel," how he argued for the "dialogic," the novel (or film) as a space for the interaction of various different fictional voices, defined by age, sex, gender, class, history, etc. A lot of Four Nights gets into a muddle on this score, because on the one hand, these "voices" are all inside Bel's head, so they will all sound like her to an extent. But on the other hand, their semi-independent presence implies a splitting, some elements of Bel that are incommensurable to "Bel Prime." So there ought to be more distinction, I think.

And this leads to my concern with Felicity. As you show her, she is a figment, or a memory, or something in between. So we only understand her inasmuch as Bel does, or wants us to. But this puts the viewer (well, okay, me) at a great emotional disadvantage. We don't know who Felicity is / was, how she came into Bel's life, how or why she left -- did she die in an accident? -- and most importantly, who she was that she could have left such a huge hole in Bel. I hate to say it, but I think you skirt some tricky territory by centering your film on a gay relationship, because if Bel were Bill, Felicity's lack of objective, independent substance might seem like idealization. And yes, we all idealize our chosen love objects, but when it becomes part of a fictional narrative it intersects with certain dominant ideologies.

I'm probably being obtuse here, but I will freely admit that I have no idea what they stocking-headed people were doing there. I mean, I suspect it reflects distortions of Bel's lived memories, but they seemed to pop up in places that didn't conform to any recognizable pattern. And -- last criticism, I promise -- I had some trouble with the decor. I realize that as a super-independent filmmaker, you are working on a budget. But the interior of Bel's home is such a major player in Four Nights, as the container of her mental state and, it seems, her literal agoraphobic prison. And it just seemed so nondescript. Random art on the walls, cheap lamps... Again, I feel as though this aspect of the film is stranded between strategies. You could make the most of this lower middle class environment by going all Dogme 95, heightening the lack of atmosphere. Or you could remove objects, make it eerily spare and minimal, like Bergman or Dreyer. (Or then again, since this is as much a head-space as a living space, you could go all Michael Snow, having objects literally appear and disappear.) 

In short, I think that Four Nights is a compelling project, and I very much appreciate that you are so forcefully emphasizing tone over narrative closure. But I think that, because you are scaling back narrative information and working on a (damaged) psychological level, every element must be controlled, just right. I think this film could have been scuzzy, like Abel Ferrara, where trauma is legible right off the surface, in the use of lighting, grain, and mise-en-scène. Or I think it could have been so meticulously constructed that the oddness of every sonic and auditory gesture would have taken the viewer to some unidentifiable other-zone. I'm not sure if I think Four Nights tries to do too much, but I do think it is sometimes at odds with itself, moving in incompatible directions.

But keep in mind, I have my own biases. You know this, so you also know to take my comments with a few grains of salt. Being mostly unfamiliar with your work, I am missing something very crucial here, which is what, for lack of a better term, I will call the Honors Zombie Project. All filmmakers have an aesthetic program, one that develops and shifts across individual works but is always there, the brainwave signature of the artist him/herself. I don't have your other films to bounce Four Nights off of, so I am certain I am missing a lot. So these are, in essence, remarks in a vacuum.

And I want to thank you for the opportunity to view Four Nights. It was a very generous gesture on your part, and I hope my thoughts come across in the same spirit.

All best,

Michael