Jacques de Baroncelli’s I’ll Be Alone After Midnight gets
off to a cracking start, with a montage of aggrieved individuals attacking
their adulterous spouses, including a woman throwing sulphuric acid in her husband’s
face, and a defence lawyer speaking up for crimes of passion; it then focuses
on Monique, a moneyed woman afflicted with perhaps the all-time cheating
husband, deciding after he storms out to get her own back by spending the night
with a man. Her friend and neighbour Michel is more than willing to fill the
role, but she seeks something more transient, and ends up buying up a balloon
vendor’s entire stock, releasing them with her card and the titular message
attached to each, entrusting her immediate sexual fate to the wind. Monique and
Michel are the only characters identified by name, the others defined (apparently
as much to them as to us) by their function – a soldier, a clerk, a thief and
so on. Beneath the farcical surface, there’s something distinctly sad about the
idea of so many men twisting their lives into a knot for the sake of what from
today’s perspective seems like at best a mechanical and soulless quickie,
counterpointed by the somewhat pitiful Michel, early on seen inscribing photographs
of Marie with messages he wishes he’d received from her, and then displaying
them around his living room: when she succumbs to him at the end, it seems just
one step removed from coercion, with almost no possibility of enduring. The inclusion
of a Black musician among the prospective suitors might have seemed moderately progressive,
if he wasn’t portrayed as a tiresome, illiterate idiot who mainly only communicates
through his saxophone. That aside though, there are some bouncy musical
sequences, and the whole thing wraps up in under an hour without even seeming
that rushed about it.
