Henri Colpi only made four films ,two in France ("une aussi longue absence" (1960) and "heureux qui comme Ulysse " (1969) ,and two in Romania ("Codine " ,arguably his masterpiece ,and this movie) ;all were off the beaten track and all deserve your undivided attention .
A small railway station in the middle of nowhere in Romania ,where the station master treats himself to the delight of a duck (run over by a train),backed with cabbages, a gossip woman and a shy maths teacher who lives alone in the small town .
Then she appears : out of the train, she seems to come."from another world " ....or "from a distant star"; Miroiu the teacher is dazzled ,so is the viewer.
Marina Vlady was of Russian descent ; her pairing with Claude Rich was a stroke of genius ;she's a socialite but her life is unfulfilled and in the short space of one night , her life will be forever changed (I"ll visit you every night") ; he's a maths teacher, who's got to live up to his reputation,because gossips run rampant in this small microcosm.
But his world is actually infinite ("we talk about infinite to teens when they study calculus"):he's got the whole sky where he's found a star near the Great Bear ; Mona ,although moving in a privileged luxury world,never looked up to sea the sky at night. At night, in the garden ,under the star-spangled sky ,they will meet ,a thousand light years from their earthly ride.
Claude Rich is at the top of his game ,the perfect daydreamer with the head in the clouds, and Vlady's luminous eyes and stunning beauty work wonders ;an infinite poetry emanates from these pictures ; nothing really happens,but something did happen.
George Delerue's score is ,as always , marvelous : the waltz theme, under the starry sky is a moment of magnificence ;Delerue who worked for the greatest directors in the world ,wrote the music to the four Colpi works. The director also wrote the words to the 1960 effort ("trois petites notes de musique" ) and to his final work ('"heureux qui comme Ulysse " ,sung by Georges Brassens.)
