After accidentally revealing her long history of meaningless flings to her husband—who doesn’t find them as meaningless as she does—middle-aged professor Maria leaves her home in Paris and checks in to a hotel across the street for a night of soul-searching. But before she has a chance to get too far with her introspection she is visited by a familiar-looking young man: her husband as he was twenty years earlier, when she first encountered him, soon followed by a host of other figures from her past. With this fanciful notion of a mature woman taking stock of her life through encounters with her ghosts, leading French auteur Christophe Honoré sends a love letter to cinema, indulging his taste for light-hearted melodrama, theatrical situations and settings reminiscent of Alain Resnais, and the comedy of remarriage associated with Hollywood greats like Howard Hawks and George Cukor. Yet On a Magical Night is more than anything else a singular tribute to a wonderful actress, Chiara Mastroianni, who has appeared in six of Honoré’s films but never ceases to astonish with her mix of elegance and awkwardness, style and vulnerability.