My Nights are More Beautiful Than your Days (1989)

As pretentious as the obtuse title would lead you to believe it is. Andrej Zulawski's film appears like an attempt by a student of Bunuel to emulate Bergman after he had just watched Kubrick's "The Shining" as evidenced by the cavernous hotel location, bellhop ghost, and men in animal costume. I definitely appreciated the bizarre aspects which kept things interesting, like a guy sitting down in the middle of a city street to carry on a conversation with his agent, when he takes a bath fully dressed in his white suit, and the girl's wholly dysfunctional entourage. Unfortunately the main character played by Jacques Dutronc is so morose that he drains my willing spirit away with every utterance and pained expression. He also has a maddening method of speech, rambling off unrelated phrases in a word game only he can follow. Additionally, Zulawski posits that if you experience a childhood trauma, your adult life will be forever ruined from the scarring. Way to completely discredit the capabilities of the human psyche there. Thankfully the luminous Sophie Marceau is present to rescue the attention during the meandering scenes. She gives a captivating performance as a striptease psychic and has never been more naked on film before or since. Zulawski uses an intrusive amount of extreme closeups of people we'd rather be get far away from to make their misery our own, but the technique is sporadically successful like during a long emotional love scene in which the viewer feels intimately involved in the act to the point of discomfort.