Nocturama – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Noc­tura­ma – first look review

09 Sep 2016

Words by Manuela Lazic

Two figures with curly dark hair wearing dark clothing, one in a yellow top, against a dark background with lights.
Two figures with curly dark hair wearing dark clothing, one in a yellow top, against a dark background with lights.
Bertrand Bonel­lo stuns with this cool­ly exact­ing, light­ly exper­i­men­tal take on the impulse mod­ern terrorism.

The new fea­ture by French direc­tor Bertrand Bonel­lo made head­lines long before its pre­mière at this year’s Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val. Its basic premise of young peo­ple plan­ning a bomb attack in Paris was deemed too hot in a cli­mate where the peri­od between ter­ror­ist attacks on French city were get­ting short­er and short­er. Yet while this trig­ger warn­ing is under­stand­able, it nonethe­less comes from a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the film’s par­tic­u­lar – and par­tic­u­lar­ly grace­ful – argument.

Through­out the film, the teenagers nev­er dis­cuss the exact moti­va­tion behind their attacks. In fact, they bare­ly talk at all. Yet their deaf­en­ing silence is rev­e­la­to­ry in itself, speak­ing of a gen­er­al, suf­fo­cat­ing malaise in the Parisian air. With immac­u­late sub­tle­ty, Bonel­lo por­trays this ten­sion found in the eerie soli­tude in present tense Paris as nudg­ing these kids into action.

Sus­pense builds up as they attempt to bring the city’s anx­i­ety to its parox­ysm with­out suc­cumb­ing to it them­selves. The direc­tor finds for­mal ways to fur­ther immerse the audi­ence in this heart-stop­ping adven­ture. Echo­ing his 2011 break­through fea­ture, House of Tol­er­ance, Bonel­lo again manip­u­lates the chronol­o­gy and per­spec­tive of events, and does so with­out warn­ing but always with coher­ence. Flash­backs to the ear­ly stages of the enter­prise appear only late in the film, and while they reveal lit­tle about the oper­a­tion itself, their sud­den inclu­sion feels like a burst of real life for these char­ac­ters, giv­ing them a pal­pa­ble sense of nor­mal­i­ty before that fate­ful day.

Such pow­er­ful sen­sa­tions also spring from Bonello’s mas­ter­ful and unapolo­getic use of mul­ti­ple view­points to accen­tu­ate the spec­tac­u­lar ele­ments of cer­tain moments. He repeats scenes of explo­sions – but more orig­i­nal­ly and shock­ing­ly, bru­tal shoot­ings – mul­ti­ple times in quick suc­ces­sion, and from var­i­ous angles. He comes close to the bom­bast of Amer­i­can action films, but adds a lay­er a feel­ing often lack­ing from this exhil­a­rat­ing trope through rich characterisation.

The kids may not have many lines and lit­tle is known about them, yet their human­i­ty shines through the actors’ faces. Bonel­lo focus­es on only at key moments, and thus avoids cheap drama­ti­sa­tion. The young adults go beyond being a metaphor for the unrest in Paris and France at large because their faces – and in fact their entire bod­ies – are giv­en space to be ful­ly expressive.

Such close­ness with these char­ac­ters comes into a dis­turb­ing rela­tion­ship with their obliv­i­ous yet under­stand­able attrac­tion to the super­fi­cial in the film’s sec­ond part. From the very begin­ning, their path is medi­at­ed by their mobile phones via the exchange of pic­tures through texts. It makes their expe­ri­ence vir­tu­al, at least to some extent. Their use of tech­nol­o­gy nev­er seems tacky, as Bonel­lo under­stands how devices have become almost an exten­sion of the body for young peo­ple. In the last seg­ment, how­ev­er, the arti­fi­cial­i­ty is com­plete, as the kids have to live in the lux­u­ry of a closed shop­ping mall, the appeal of which they can’t resist.

Try­ing on expen­sive clothes, play­ing music loud and steal­ing food, the teenagers are enjoy­ing the sim­ple but expen­sive plea­sures of the bour­geoisie life. Rather than want­i­ng to over­throw this eco­nom­ic sys­tem and have more equal­i­ty, they actu­al­ly only want to be at the top of that pyra­mid: they want to be bour­geois. David (Finnegan Old­field) plays the dark knight when dressed in a dash­ing blue suit. He heads for a wan­der and observes the city that he has brought to a stand still. Yet his sat­is­fac­tion – as well as that of his part­ners in crime – nev­er seems com­plete. The intense­ly aggres­sive pop songs he lis­tens to at the mall or the expen­sive out­fits he can bor­row can’t bring him the life his attacks have sucked from Paris.

The cru­el­ty of this sit­u­a­tion is what the direc­tor makes the audi­ence feel very strong­ly in the film’s final action-chase sequence. Find­ing refuge in beau­ti­ful things, thought­less­ness and lone­li­ness reveals itself as only a tem­po­rary relief and one that ulti­mate­ly only leads to more detach­ment and dehumanisation.

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