A thick, dark night furtively pierced by the light of a bulb that instantly goes off. This is how we enter Night Detour, a sensual drift in two movements, whose key motifs are darkness and disappearance. The story is set in a heavenly village on the Mexican west coast. To the west is the Pacific Ocean, immense, ominous, tumultuous, and on the opposite side is the jungle, lush, thick and populated by all sorts of animals. Violeta Martinez was born there. She was a young figure- skater who disappeared one day – a piece of news serving as an excuse for a drifting journey – with a Canadian journalist trying to trace her. We hardly see the journalist, only her back, or from a distance, morphing into the hot and muffled atmosphere, as she narrates her ongoing investigation, following the serpentine lines of myths and local stories. Natives, tourists, hippies stranded on the beach: all are prey to a sort of numbness and all seem to have lost their memory when it comes to reminisce about Violeta. For, “standing here facing the sea, you forget everything, don’t you?” Carried forward by a synthetic, enchanting and 70s-style soundtrack, Desvío de noche taps into the codes of the fantastic and noir films all the better to generate confusion between reality and fiction. The camera is a discreet detective that glides slowly, observing from afar, searching for clues through personal feuds or among the foliage. Following the itinerary of two men with wind- and weather-beaten faces, the narrator and journalist pushes into the forest. Almost one hour into the film, upon the actual detour in the night (Desvío de noche), the title appearance on screen is not a disruption but it rather marks the absorption of characters into the recesses of the jungle where all sense of perspective disappears. Wordlessly, through a rumbling, ubiquitous nature, the film registers the passage from one world to the other, inviting spectators to get lost in it.
(Louise Martin Papasian)Ariane Falardeau St-Amour Paul Chotel