Time is a trudging inevitability in Akerman’s early films, but in Toute Une Nuit, time will not move slow enough. The would-be lovers that comprise the film’s dramatic personae—a cast of dozens, each receiving no more than a few minutes of screen time—are constantly coming up short of their moments of bliss within the compressed dusk-to-dawn structure, which takes inventory, in a series of short vignettes, of an evening of dalliances in summertime Brussels. Radically unhinged from any overarching dramatic through line, the film becomes an austere, nearly dialogue-free collage of romantic courtship and companionship in which yearning and frustration are the default emotions. Ecstasy, if and when it’s attained, is impulsive and fleeting, and staged by Akerman via melodramatic MGM-like embraces that are stripped of surrounding audiovisual bombast. Lovers grip each other as if for the last time in darkened alleyways, stark apartment lobbies or seedy diners, but the camera offers no kinetic embellishments, only a stoical gaze from afar. The severe, flavorless surfaces of Brussels are the subject of Toute Une Nuit; the characters are just the tragicomic figurines passing by.