“The Passengers of the Night” also recalls the sounds of an era of change.

A Special Reality Brought about by Song Selections that Do Not Match the Period

Another interesting aspect of the film’s strict period setting is that the music selection sometimes deviates from the realism of the film. One is Low’s “Slide,” a song from 1994, which is superimposed over a series of montages beginning with the scene in which Talulah and Matthias reunite in 1988 to watch Jacques Rivette’s “Le Pont du Nord” Furthermore, after the family dance scene, the folk song that plays during the scene where they are listening to “my father’s records” is John Cunningham’s “Hollow Truce,” released in 1992.

This arbitrary use of pop music, which seems to be an attempt to sneak in fictionality, can be analyzed as suggesting the characters’ “beyond” because the songs are from the “future” in terms of the film’s setting, and because they are both used near the end of the film. More importantly, however, the song selection does not damage the “truthfulness” of the film, but rather highlights the special reality of film appreciation as a temporal/spatial art that must always be replayed as an experience of the “here and now,” even though it contains fluctuations of temporality/spatiality within it.

The “here and now” as realized through reminiscence

The act and state of listening (hearing) reveals the fact that no matter when or where he/she/it/I/you are (even if you are “remembering” the sound), these subjects cannot escape the fact that they belong to and have belonged to the “here and now”. Pop music in this film is always present when someone listens to it in the “here and now,” whether it is the characters when it is the source music, or us, the viewers or the creators, when it is the underscore.

In film, pop music also carries a rich duality because of the different temporalities it carries within and around it (even more so when it is not newly written for film), and hopefully, through the act of “listening,” it skillfully encompasses this duality. Because various people have listened to certain pop music with various memories, recollections, and images of the past, the film deftly uses this accumulation to balance its own fiction and realism, and eventually superimposes it on the film itself.

The reality of this superimposition may be even more glamorous in the sense that we are in touch with unknown memories and the past “here and now,” even if we have never actually listened to pop music before, or perhaps even when we are exposed to it for the first time. Paris Dawns at 4 a.m.” is a very “present” film in the sense that it both refines the use of pop music in film and reminds us of ourselves in the “here and now” through reminiscence. Perhaps the “loss” and “rebirth” depicted in this film can be compared to the cycle of memorization and rebirth that is fatal to pop music from time to time.