“What’s the goal?” Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé) asks his boyfriend’s younger sister Apo (Lila Gueneau Lefas) one afternoon, looking over her shoulder at her favorite fantasy video game, Darknoon. “There isn’t one, really,” she replies “you try to improve; you expand your territory; you eliminate your enemies.”
In Eat the Night, French filmmaking duo Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s quiet sophomore feature, three lonely, digitally-saturated young people blur the boundaries between playing at adulthood on the outskirts and taking on the responsibilities that come with that way of living. When the devoted users of Darknoon — a video game in the film — learn their server is on the brink of going dark forever, after a decade of obsessive play, Apo and her drug-dealer older brother, Pablo (a magnetic and mischievous Théo Cholbi), are unceremoniously thrust into their lives offline. After Pablo is beaten by a real-life gang whose territory he’s inadvertently violated, he meets Night, and the two become partners in crime as well as love. This new relationship reshapes the two siblings’ lives and puts all three characters on a collision course with realities none of them would like to wake up to.
The film is a dreamy yarn, a queer coming-of-age story illuminated by the soft, lulling LED of a computer screen and the weak day-glo of string lights and snake tanks; its diversions are satisfyingly temporary, its ideas mature yet spare. While Eat the Night may feel at once overly familiar and, in places, too-thinly drawn, the filmmaker’s delicate approach to this slice-of-life tale is nevertheless compelling and tender, with a brightly imaginative streak.
At its best, Eat the Night evokes the looseness and wistful romance of films like Foxfire. Cholbi and Falé are a comfortable pairing with strong chemistry. They balance freewheeling boyish charm and sweet domesticity in the elegantly derelict house they’ve made their squat (think Rebel Without a Cause), holding dance parties for two, kicking a soccer ball around the yard, and cuddling on the couch. Their drug dealing is presented as almost offhand, an easy money job that beats stocking shelves at a grocery store, as Night does when he’s introduced. In one illustrative scene, they flirt as Pablo instructs a delighted Night on how to make Ecstasy, using a machine to press piles of colorful pills with shapes that evoke cartoon-themed children’s vitamins, tripping at odd hours and watching massive container ships float by on the river.
As the days until Darknoon’s decommissioning tick down and the rivalry between Pablo and the local gang boss heats up, this aimlessness is met with increasingly aimless acts of violence from Pablo, tying the couple’s youthful apathy to the no-stakes fantasy of his favorite childhood game. This I Saw the TV Glow parallel, illustrated through long and increasingly immersive scenes of gameplay as well as frequent, dissociated POV shots on Pablo’s Vespa, is the film’s most unique element, a poignant metaphor for both the self-fabulating power and intimacy of creating a shared fantasy via a game and the inevitable limits of that same escapist tendency. At one point, Pablo repeatedly throws himself into a wall to express his grief and impotent rage, using his body like an avatar in the game.
Lefas’ performance as the shy-yet-snarky video game-obsessed Apo is another strength. She’s a quiet presence, but her budding friendship with Night is the most maturely ambiguous element of the narrative, played by both actors as a hazy sort of chemistry, a bond that, like Plato and Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, is both the sum of their shared love for the same man and something deeper, less well-defined. This sexual ambiguity is in some ways the beating heart of the film, with polymorphous, quasi-incestuous eroticism permeating the atmosphere of both the game (the 15-year-old’s avatar is a busty adult sporting fishnet sleeves and a thong) and the parentless, mutedly hedonistic life the three build around each other.
While Eat the Night risks conventionality in some of its plotlines –– many of its narrative outcomes are predictable –– it nevertheless displays a great deal of stylistic originality, with Poggi and Vinel’s subtle direction supplying at least some pathos. While the film certainly falls short of generating the deep wells of feeling to which it aspires, primarily through its most genre-standard plot points, its voice is still striking, its characterizations memorable.
