Nocturama First Rewrite

Complete first rewrite for Reverse Shot.

Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? Ryan Swen Revisits Nocturama "In 2014, I told you about a film I wanted to make, as brief and clear as a gesture. I made it, but, in the end, it was long and complicated. The film was dedicated to you. I know you haven't seen it. That doesn't matter." - Bertrand Bonello, Coma The ability to see the context in which you're working isn't necessarily a good thing. For reasons I'll get to in a moment, I'm writing this essay—which I promise will be about my relationship to Bertrand Bonello's 2016 masterpiece Nocturama—as a meager, long-delayed coda to the symposium that you read a few months ago. This collection features astonishingly inventive and incisive writing from some of the best film critics I know, and, consequently, has had the rather unfortunate effect of serving as both motivator and intimidator. As will always be the case with this now-venerable publication, to be part of the Reverse Shot roster—seeing my humble words alongside many people who have inspired and improved my critical faculties—is still a total joy. That is, until I realize what I have to live up to. It's relatively easy to write a distinct, standalone review: though there might be a lineage of writing on a particular director or festival, the subject is almost always understood to be the film first, and more often than not it will be rich enough (in ways positive and/or negative) to suffice. But upon reading through the published pieces—when confronted with Adam Nayman and Nick Pinkerton's questioning of their Young Turk days in this publication's infancy (only a few years after my own), Chloe Lizotte's evocation of her adolescence through the unlikeliest of sources, or Julien Allen's exegesis of the ex-Greatest Film of All Time—the gravity of the task becomes far more forceful. Most pertinent of all, of course, were Michael Koresky's own piece grappling with the anxiety of influence—the latent desire to agree with and understand the differing viewpoints of trusted colleagues and inspirations while also being true to one's own predilections and critical judgment—and Jordan Cronk's, which, in its own display of his influence on me and my own lack of imagination, tackled my film's direct directorial predecessor by grounding it in the rigors of the festival circuit. The vagaries of influence don't stop at film taste: they seep into writing style even before a piece lands in an editor's inbox. This is especially true when considering how to write an entry in a series: as I churned out countless false starts and thousands of words while attempting to just begin this particular form of the piece, I constantly looked back at my predecessors, trying to figure out how they succeeded where I was failing. Should I begin by quoting from one of my own reviews of Nocturama? Should I discuss the particular state I was in when I first encountered the film? Or should I attempt to go down a different path? This was all compounded by the haunting knowledge of the past versions of what I wanted to convey. After a catastrophic loss of a nearly complete draft and imperfect attempts to reconstruct it, I finally turned in a first draft back in November. For better or worse, I got it back after a longer-than-usual interval, and while Koresky's typically constructive and comprehensive edits didn't suggest a massive amount of revising, I had already grown disenchanted with what I had written just weeks before. The personal histories and reminiscences about reception seemed dull and meandering, the film analysis felt incomplete, and my ideas about influence were largely superseded by Koresky's infinitely more eloquent ruminations. I poked and prodded at the edits, but the idea to completely rewrite it emerged, a chance at some kind of personal redemption that I couldn't shake. I've questioned that inclination countless times in the months that have followed: while the editing process was becoming more and more taxing—each friendly note a brutal reminder of my inadequacies—the prospect of coming up with an entirely different essay with its own potential for failure has been even more painful. But it was necessary for me, because something designed to be personal should not feel false or woefully inadequate. ***** All of this might seem extraneous, were it not for the fact that, for me, this writing struggle and Bertrand Bonello's films—with Nocturama as the standard bearer—have become almost synonymous, in a manner that enhances rather than detracts from the immediacy of his work. This obsession with his oeuvre isn't new, strictly speaking: when the call for submissions was made, Nocturama sprang immediately to mind because it's a film I think about constantly, despite not having seen it in full since 2017, my first complete year of "serious" film criticism. I watched it twice that year, prompting first a cautiously admiring capsule review for Seattle Screen Scene in June, then a full-length, more openly adulatory full-length review for the same publication in September; it remains the only time I've ever reviewed a film twice in the same year. At the time, I felt compelled to write something more positive, in large part because—even though I had misgivings about what I perceived to be its cold-bloodedness and cagy avoidance of politics—I felt the hypnotic pull of its style needed to be highlighted for the one-night-only Seattle release as much as possible. Looking back on those reviews, I see that I focused to a pronounced degree upon the reactions of others, perhaps a way of signaling that I knew and understood the importance of the context around the film: in the capsule "controversial" is one of the first descriptors; the full review mentions "the curious nature of its reception" and "reactions, praise and criticism alike." From my viewpoint, this latter grouping mainly relied on the general approbation of critics I was aware of at the time—people like Mike D'Angelo, Blake Williams, Matt Lynch, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky—in contrast to notable snubs from the Cannes and New York Film Festivals. Inevitably, an enormous amount of influence upon my level of interest in a given film can be traced to the reactions of peoples and institutions such as these, a path of exploration that probably took up more than it should have in the past version of this piece. Instead, what I'm interested in now lies in the connective threads between Bonello's films and, in probably an impudent leap in logic, my own writing situation. So hasty was I in past reviews to praise Bonello's form—disjunctive character perspectives, sinuous Steadicam shots, startling split screens—that I could often lose sight of exactly how his films played out scene-to-scene, how the elegance of his narratives was essential for landing the hammer blows that so often wallop me at the end of any work of his. It's not that I see myself as being a much more "curious" or observant viewer and writer now; indeed, the marked downturn in film viewing due to other obligations since that time has curtailed some of my more adventurous impulses. But I find the act of divining how—within already familiar works—fundamental mechanics (in general and to Bonello specifically) lead to the ineffable and sublime more fascinating and fulfilling than I once did. Broadly speaking, Bonello's films are usually about outsiders caught in the sweep of their milieus, often anticipating a catastrophe or attempting to live on in the wake of it. Usually, these will happen courtesy of an exterior force: for instance, the maiming of a sex worker in House of Tolerance, the pandemic in Coma, and the various calamities within The Beast. However, Nocturama concerns itself with its protagonists' direct action, a forceful and coordinated series of bombings whose intent is never entirely revealed. Obviously for me, the decision to set out on an entirely different tack of writing is nowhere near as drastic, but it came in the wake of a series of unfortunate events that each impeded my writing progress; somehow, I eventually managed to continue writing. In my full review, I made a telling error in quoting André (Martin Guyot), a political school student describing his entrance exam strategy to Sarah (Laure Valentinelli): I thought he said that "the existence of capitalism is a precondition for the downfall of capitalism," but his actual subject was civilization itself. I also completely missed the context he couched it in, as the conclusion of a five-step plan for academic success: "In part A, expose the problem and define it. In part B, explain it. In part C, take it to its paroxysm to define the limits. And, in D, suggest a solution. You can add a risky theory too. Something politically incorrect or even unacceptable. Even if they don't like it, they'll want you to fuel the debate." Such a pair of mistakes probably wouldn't matter in a much lesser film. But in works as ideologically concentrated as Bonello's, stray comments and glancing actions form an embodied—if not necessarily articulated—political worldview. Bonello isn't making airtight analyses, of course. Therefore, his approach is much less rigid, and he can be said to be working within three elements of André's essay plan: exposing the problem, by virtue of its consistent demonstration and elaboration across Nocturama; adding a risky theory, via its centering of terrorism and complication of ideology through the cross-class and multi-ethnic crew; and, above all, taking it to its paroxysm. A spectacular bombing is met by a total crackdown, and in between the characters' avenues for exploration of identity and commodity wind through the second half's setting within a high-end shopping mall, an ultimate arena of civilization's highs and lows. The thrill of the paroxysm, of course, is what's so compelling about Bonello, his penchant for coups de cinema virtually guaranteed to occur multiple times within a single film. But it also makes it easy to reduce an assessment of his work to just those moments. Indeed one of only a few moments that I mentioned in the full review was Yacine's (Hamza Meziani) lip sync in drag to Shirley Bassey's cover of "My Way." It's of course a great scene, but in my two rewatches in preparation for this piece I found just as much enjoyment in the stray shot of his formation of dolls arranged on the floor, or him playing a few moments of Grand Theft Auto V. Contra the two signature images of Nocturama—Yacine looking at a Nike mannequin wearing the exact same clothes as him and Mika (Jamil McCraven) wearing a gold featureless mask—these are not merely interchangeable representations of the youth: they register quickly and profoundly as their own separate beings, with their own relationships and preferred friendships that are displayed both during relaxation and while executing the terror plot. This deep into my history with the film, I have a great affection for all of them. It certainly doesn't hurt that, seven years on, I'm now roughly the same age as the average member of the group, and even better able to appreciate the weird state of suspension induced during one's mid-twenties. Like the displaced, directionless characters, I also feel like I'm at a crossroads with hundreds of possibilities arrayed around me, none especially appealing, and something like this essay acts as a distilled exemplar of that tendency. If Nocturama is strictly taken to be a film about a political act and its consequences, then it is defined by failure: multiple breakdowns in planning, rapid discovery by and inability to stave off the gendarmerie, and the lack others inspired to enact some kind of passionate response. When I was at my most stuck on this piece, I tended to view the characters and myself through that lens: potentially noble intentions gone to naught, trapped under the weight of expectations and imposing forebears. But, only partly as a means to actually write this essay, I started to see things differently. Returning to the civilization/capitalism divide: it's common to cite the second half of Nocturama as, per my full review, "every member of the crew slowly succumb[ing] to the decadent pleasures of the mall's many products and accoutrements"; in effect, to see their behavior as a betrayal of their disruptive ideals. And yet, two elements have turned my thinking on its head. For one, the characters are generally seen in their firmly consumerist ways of living long before they get to the shopping mall; if they are tempted by capitalism, it is a return to a form of normal behavior rather than a collapse of an ideal. And the other rests in an especially resonant bit of casting, especially in relation to the wide cast of newcomers: Hermine Karaghuez, a key performer for Jacques Rivette—one of cinema's greatest masters at both paranoia and play—as one member of the homeless couple that David (Finnegan Oldfield) impulsively invites into the mall. One of Bonello's most underdiscussed traits goes hand-in-hand with his trademark flair for languor: his ability to craft character dynamics that wouldn't be out of place in a hangout movie. The easy belief in a friendship bond is central to his ensemble-heavy films, like Nocturama and House of Tolerance, and also was a key aspect of Rivette's cinema. Whether in the upbeat feminist celebration of Céline and Julie Go Boating or the pessimistic dissolution of Out 1, Rivette always found a way to foster these connections and evolve them as his extended durations found new iterations. If I ascribe a certain Rivettian spirit to Nocturama, focusing on the mall as a space of possibility instead of a trap (both moral and mortal) and on the beauty of the group dynamics, then a much less cynical, much more tragic portrait emerges, even beyond the sight of so much youth gone to ruin. Through the course of their travels through the mall, the crew avails themselves of so many undoubtedly costly goods and services for free: beautiful clothes, great food, a booming audio system, even an uninhibited go-kart ride. They consume without directly contributing to the capitalist system, free from the rules normally governing the way things are run. The mall thus becomes their own bubble, one that, while doomed to burst, is not lacking in meaning or personal fulfillment, and seeing their potential and the utopia-for-a-night come to a violent end is heartbreaking. It might be gauche to say, but yes, some films, even ones as evocative of the present state of the world in crisis, can come to feel like a safe bubble. For all the destruction and tragedy in his films, Bonello's body of work has increasingly become something of a tonic for me, a dependable atmosphere to sink into when nothing outside of them seems to be going in the right direction. In Coma, Bonello bookends the film with two addresses to his daughter—to whom he dedicated Nocturama; she was roughly half the age of the film's characters—and his quote at the top of this piece expresses the odd transmutation that the artistic process can cause, and the fear that such effort will be all for naught, which I shared in abundance for many months. At the film's close, he describes lockdown as a kind of limbo, which at its root means "a blank space waiting to be filled. In the center, there is no space. It is in limbo that you'll see things impossible to see elsewhere... and that is the moment when one attains poetry, that which we shall need when a new day dawns." I won't pretend that this process has necessarily made me capable of writing poetry, but I'll gladly keep returning to the glorious limbo that is Nocturama, hoping for that day to come.

Nocturama Fragments

Fragments from attempt to write first rewrite for Reverse Shot.

1. When Michael and Jeff first put out their call for symposium submissions, it didn't take me long to think of Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama (2016), which has vexed me like almost no other film since its release eight years ago. It was in many ways an obvious choice: I reviewed it not once but twice, in both capsule and full-length review form for Seattle Screen Scene, the website that gave me my start in film criticism, at a time when I was still finding my way into the festival and cultural landscape. Furthermore, my thoughts on the film shifted both between the two viewings that occasioned the reviews—at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2017 and at Film at Lincoln Center only two months later—and in the years that followed. What began as a warily appreciative appraisal turned somewhat more passionate; now, I consider it one of the signal films of the 2010s, a singularly daring and willfully contemporary work whose concerns—youth, terrorism, mass culture—mesh with Bonello's skill with thrilling procedure to produce something resolutely unplaceable, even phantomlike. Nocturama has what might be considered two signal images, the frames that leap to mind before any others:

2. But as I wrote those words, I found myself second-guessing the meaning of those words, and even whether they should be written at all. Much as one might try to conceal the process that goes into writing a piece, a "finished" work of writing bears the stitches of a Frankenstein creation, cobbled together from stop-start writing sessions, hasty passes, and the scalpels of several very fine editors. The process does not stop there of course: just as a film depends on what the viewer brings to the moment of bearing witness, so does a piece of writing come into a different light when confronted by the reader. I say these truisms to lay bare that, appropriately enough for such a complex film, no film piece has ever been more difficult for me to conceive than the one that you are reading right now. Part of this comes down to the length of time, and other obstacles that arose during the writing process:

3. One of the great, nebulous concepts that governs this ever-shifting realm we call film criticism in the 21st century is “the voice.” Any person seeking to make a name for themselves, to become established and respected by their peers, must at some point—preferably as soon as possible, maybe even before they really find their footing—carve out a particular niche that will serve as the signifiers of their zone of interest. These can be defined in near-limitless ways, at least within the confines of what films are available to be pitched and written about, but what matters is the critic's ability to group these together. Whether it's determined by country of origin, by a buzzy movement, or a more hazy shared "sensibility," the categories that the voice is premised upon are taken by the reader to be the critic's area(s) of expertise: are you an expert in Chinese cinema? In the modern avant-garde? In slow cinema? Whatever the critic settles on—whether through their own prerogative, their editor's assignments, or simply the screenings left over—becomes part of their branding, the thing for which they are known and encouraged to continue cultivating. Obviously, the voice is as ultimately illusory and simplified as any ironclad definition in the multi-faceted realm of art, even among those of us who try to argue for the validity of our take. There's many different voices that we carry within ourselves, often shifting from outlet to outlet and quite frequently not correlating with what we might believe on a given day. But the voice doesn't just

4. The illusion inherent in many film pieces is the coherency of perspective: a stable, authoritative, fixed critical vantage point from which the writer issues forth an opinion that, while it may shift to one degree or another as the months and years go by, is taken to be their authentic and unalloyed view at this particular moment in time. Inherent in this formulation is

5. And yet, in the months that have passed since I first started attempting to craft my own contribution, I have been faced with my own seeming inability to reconcile what I find to be a maelstrom of competing ideas,

6. In their typically eloquent introduction to the symposium you have been reading for the past few months, Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert noted that "so much film criticism is done in the heat of the moment, and all of it is always, usually unbeknownst to the writer, connected to the circumstance, age, and ever-shifting experience of the time of life in which it is written," a sentiment which has stuck with me since I first read it, in their call for submissions issued many months ago. The implication of passion dispelling self-examination, rushing past reservations to issue a vociferous take in praise or damnation of a particular work, is often a truer description of the way in which we engage with a work than the self-styled sober expertise and erudite insight that we may wish to project as a means of justifying our little alcoves in a film culture increasingly saturated with the cacophonous words of many. Theoretically, then, this symposium provided an opportunity to resist the predominant impulse to expound on an exterior work, instead turning the mirror back on ourselves through the portal provided by something that this mind, these hands produced all those years ago. There is an implicit assumption in that line of thinking: that such self-examination—or indeed, film criticism writ large—can be done from a more-or-less fixed vantage point, a single frame of mind that, all the fretting over sentences and details aside, represents a coherent thesis sustained through any given piece. I know that this is possible: a great number of the best current critics I know (and am proud to call friends) have taken astonishingly divergent and illuminating paths towards this invitation to delve into their past thoughts, whether it be Adam Nayman and Nick Pinkerton's questioning of their Young Turk days in this publication's infancy, Chloe Lizotte's evocation of her own adolescence through the unlikeliest of sources, or Jordan Cronk's clear engagement with the festival rigors influencing his viewing, among many others. But how do you write about the impossible? How do you capture the feeling, indeed the urge, to embark on a self-examination of self-examination, if the layers of thought are content to stop there? This is not and cannot be one of those cogent pieces, or at least not in the same manner. It arrives far behind its brethren, due in large part to exterior factors: the catastrophic loss of a nearly complete draft, the demands of law school, the

7. In an interview with Nick Newman for The Film Stage on the occasion of the US release of his new film The Beast, Bertrand Bonello mentioned that he had published a book of the scripts that he had written but not directed, entitled Ghost Films (Films fantômes). Casting the process of writing and preparing a film as a dreamlike obsession only exorcised upon the completion of the film, he wondered about those incomplete projects, musing that "they still live in you—they obsess you like a ghost." Bonello, among his countless strengths, is one of modern cinema's greatest purveyors of ghost stories, albeit not usually in the traditional, explicitly paranormal manner. Instead, his films all take the forms of hauntings, whether capturing the spirits of times long past or the precarity of modern existence. That the experience of watching them frequently invokes both pulse-pounding tension and languorous hedonism only enhances that feeling: the extremes of both sensations coalesce into an experience that weighs heavily on the mind, shapeshifting and burrowing deeper as the weeks and months since any given viewing accumulate. Obsession is, of course, one of the hallmarks of cinephilia, both within countless cherished films—everything from the

8. I've never been one of those film critics who has obsessed over every word they write. While I take pride in many of the pieces and reviews I've written over the years, and some have had much more arduous gestation periods than others, I generally attempt to embrace something verging towards spontaneity. Unfortunately, that comes with

9. How do you write about your own failings? This was never a piece about a single past instance of writing. It began, almost innocuously, as a consideration of two reviews I wrote scarcely three months apart in 2017, both for Seattle Screen Scene and about Bonello's Nocturama: from that June, a somewhat admiring capsule published during the Seattle International Film Festival; in September, a more substantial, positively inclined piece.

10. As I write these words, I'm staring at four tabs on my Internet browser and a Word document. 1. A capsule I wrote about Bertrand Bonello's 2016 masterpiece Nocturama for Seattle Screen Scene, published in June 2017 on the occasion of the Seattle International Film Festival. 2. A review I wrote about Nocturama for the same publication from that September. 3. A draft of a post on my blog, comprising close to 1,500 words from ten separate attempts (and counting) to make even some headway on this piece in the past few months. 4. The landing page for this symposium, containing insightful and surprising pieces from some of the smartest critics I know. 5. The complete first draft that I wrote for this symposium in November, dotted with Michael Koresky's typically helpful and comprehensive edits, only some of which I've resolved. They are the digital manifestations of the ghosts that have haunted me for the better part of a year, ever since Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert first put out the call for submissions to the symposium that this straggling, attenuated piece hopefully forms something of a serviceable coda for. They seem to be almost taunting me with their demonstrations of past failures, potential successes, and above all the massive mental effort that has gone into this piece still yet in the making, still unproven and theoretical. All of this could have been easily avoided, with this piece coming somewhere in the midst of its brethren, an innocuous bit of self-examination like all the others,

11. Words can't express the strangeness of contributing even a long-delayed, meager coda to this symposium. When Reverse Shot first began publication, I was five-and-a-half years old, still a decade away from even beginning to grasp the outlines of the film culture that I would soon find myself enmeshed in. I am not the very newest member of the RS roster in this symposium, but there isn't a great deal of time separating those of us relative newcomers. More important, of course, is the experience

12. If only I had read Bonello's words before choosing my film for this symposium. It should have been a simple task: though my relatively recent entry into film criticism limited the slate of reviews from which to choose, that still left a whole bevy of possibilities. I could have returned to my very first proper review with Cameraperson, revisited the personal dimensions of my assessment of Silence, even confronted the

13. On my blog, I have a draft of a post that has swelled to nearly two thousand words. It contains numbered entries ranging from a few words to numerous paragraphs, each representing a failed attempt to make headway on the piece that (hopefully) you are reading now. No one grouping of words is entirely alike, and they vary wildly in quality, insight, and coherence, but they each represent a different pathway, trying to grab hold of some aspect or the other of not just two disparate encounters with a film, but instead what it means to reckon with my history with a work of art.

14. But I feel much more strongly about Bonello's films now, thanks to the multiple viewings of a number of his films I've undertaken for this piece, up to and including his latest masterwork The Beast. In refreshing my memory and considerably raising my estimation of films like House of Tolerance, Zombi Child, and, yes, Nocturama, I feel that some aspect of his cinematic worldview has permanently affixed itself to my vision, or perhaps that the constant exposure has revealed a lens that was previously unconscious. As much as his precise, foreboding frames and synth-heavy scores, Bonello's films are defined by their focus on outsiders within clearly defined milieus. The eponymous fashion magnate in Saint Laurent, the quarantined teenager in Coma, the thwarted lovers across time in The Beast: all of these figures outwardly belong to social classes that possess a certain status, and yet they are all set apart from the people they interact with by dint of their particular psyches. In the collective yet isolated protagonists of House of Tolerance and Nocturama, this distinction is heightened. If I may be so bold: despite the geographical/temporal/sociological/etc. gap, I see myself in Bonello's heroes.

Nocturama First Draft

Complete first draft for Reverse Shot.

Any consideration of my journey through cinephilia and film criticism since it began in the mid-2010s must involve a heavy amount of self-doubt and humble acknowledgment. It is, of course, an unavoidable part of any proper art education for the learner to bear traces of their tutors' interests; for such a young and compressed medium as film, this is even more evidently the case. But whenever I go back and examine a previously held opinion or a review written even a few months ago, two self-defeating questions come to mind, which both simultaneously hold positive and negative connotations: "How was I able to write this?" and "Do/did I actually believe this, or was it just the regurgitated view of someone I admire?" This is something that goes beyond the state of world cinema at the moment, where (for better or worse) what gets seen in this country is determined mostly by the festival circuit, American distributors, and critical champions. It can't be a coincidence, for example, that virtually everything that ends up among my favorite films of a given year was programmed at the New York Film Festival, was on the top 10s of Dennis Lim or Jordan Cronk, or can be slotted under any other easily ascertainable influence. Many such figures, including this august publication and those associated with it, have affected and continue to hold sway over my ways of thinking, and I am at all times eternally thankful for that fact. However, that still doesn't ameliorate the worries of being merely a mouthpiece for the opinions of others, spinning off unoriginal ideas and tastes as my own. These thoughts are induced, even more than by the films I came to love immediately, largely courtesy of the films that I have wrestled with over the years and eventually embraced. And almost no film has vexed me as thoroughly, from initial debate to mixed first encounter to current adoration, as Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama (2016). Fittingly, Bonello's presence in the current cinematic consciousness presents something of a challenge. On the one hand, he is tremendously in vogue, making genre-inflected, thoroughly cinephilic works with cool, attractive people; on the other, his films are withholding, resisting conventional emotional arcs or political readings and seemingly concerned with his own bewitching aesthetic sensibilities above all else. Consequently, he has consistently remained an enigmatic figure, where every one of his films feels like an Event, even if he has never had a film that truly landed at the center of a more "mainstream" film culture. By the time Nocturama premiered, I was already familiar with Bonello: I had seen (and mildly appreciated) House of Tolerance (2011) and Saint Laurent (2014) months before and was already acutely aware of the controversy swirling around it. On the one hand, there were the raves trickling in from trusted critics—which, if memory serves, included Mike D'Angelo, Blake Williams, Matt Lynch, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky—as it slowly made its way around the festival circuit; on the other, there were the notable snubs from the (admittedly stacked) Cannes and New York selections and the persistent questions over its tackling of terrorism and radical beliefs, especially in the face of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks during and after production, the full flowering of right-wing populism during its premiere year, and my own concurrent political development in the opposite direction. I didn't get the opportunity to experience Nocturama firsthand until June 2017, when it played at the Seattle International Film Festival, and I subsequently wrote a brief two-paragraph capsule for Seattle Screen Scene which reads to me now as much more laudatory than my semi-mixed feelings on that first viewing. After a second, more appreciative viewing in August during a visit to New York (I had reasoned that I'd be unable to see the film in a theater again anytime soon), I reviewed the film once more for Seattle Screen Scene, this time a full-length review. That remains the only time I've "formally" reviewed a film twice during its theatrical release, as clear a sign as any of the tendrils that the film had already hooked into my brainpan, even if at that point I still wasn't entirely sold on everything it was doing. Memory, for opinions of one's own and of others, has a tricky way of distorting itself over the years. One of my stronger associations with Nocturama was the Film Comment Podcast about it, which I recalled as being profoundly mixed but in reality was generally adulatory; perhaps I had remembered the brief gripe about the obviousness of the weeping Joan of Arc statue aflame as characterizing the response to the film at large. I do remember that the inclusion of the film on this very publication's top 10 was a surprise to me, but I can't place why; save for maybe Nick Pinkerton, I can't recall any prominent critics I was already very aware of who didn't care for the film. I bring up all of this background to illustrate all the other factors outside the film that have come to shape my thoughts relating to Nocturama, both at the time and in the years to come. I had revisited Bonello's work in small segments but hadn't rewatched the film in full until I began preparation for this piece; thus, in many ways the thoughts of others and my willingness to be persuaded by their even more positive feelings threatened to supplant my memory of the film itself. So while I do agree with them now that Nocturama stands as one of the greatest and most compelling films of the past decade, the struggle to get to that point paradoxically makes me question that viewpoint even more. But maybe that's a worthy fate for a film that is as phantomlike and unplaceable as Bonello's, a film which could be seen as populated by the walking dead even before its protagonists hole up in a department store à la Romero; whether they be the youthful, desperate terrorists, desultory authority figures, or faceless gendarmerie, a latent doom lingers over every image, only underscored by the lack of allegiance to any identifiable ideology and thus a commitment to "real-life" politics. When I look back at my pair of reviews, one part leaps out: I referred to Nocturama as a "'thriller' (for lack of a better term)" in the capsule. Depending on one's definition of the genre, that might be true, but it provides a handy key difference between my view of the film then and now. In short, I do find the film immensely thrilling: as captivating as ever in the execution of the terrorist attacks, to be sure, but even moreso once the film slips into the shopping mall. In my general absorption of the disparate views on the film, virtually all of them had concentrated on the main characters' status as terrorists, close to the neglect of everything else. But now that aspect of the film feels, if not merely a Trojan horse, then at most half of its raison d'être: the importance of play, not merely as a sign of a decadent society infecting the minds of principled resistors, but instead as an end unto itself filled with possibilities and different means of expression, only seems to become more and more paramount. When I keep this idea in mind, certain elements that I had not fully understood at the time seem to make more sense. While Nocturama's title presents an immediately foreboding sensation that I've grown more and more attached to over the years, the delightful original title, Paris Is a Party, which was changed in response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings occurring during production, seems to better capture this other side of the film. I had mentioned this name change in my full-length review, largely as a means of explaining the film's incendiary nature, but didn't extrapolate it to its logical conclusion: the party rages on in both halves, with bombings and after-hours materialism alike as equally festive manifestations of the youthful spirit and its urge to blow up the town. To further bolster this newfound reading, there is a key piece of casting which held no importance for me on those first two viewings: Hermine Karaghuez, a key performer for Jacques Rivette, one of cinema's greatest masters at both paranoia and play. Her most prominent roles for him were as the theater troupe performer who unexpectedly takes center stage in the final shot of Out 1: Noli me tangere and the human who triumphs over the Sun and Moon goddesses in Duelle (une quarantaine), two of the clearest examples in his remarkable oeuvre of cinema's capability to transform mortals into icons. Here, she plays one of the two unhoused people that are impulsively allowed into the department store and die along with the terrorists much younger than themselves, in possibly the film's bluntest illustration of how the capitalist death machine chews up and spits out those without power. But she still gets her own moments of lightness, happily partaking in luxury victuals, a sudden reprieve from ordinary existence as significant as the actions of the more monied main characters. That odd sense of generosity and warmth, in contrast to what I called in my capsule a film of "cold-blooded brutality," has only become more important to my adoration of Nocturama. It's far more apparent now even during the execution of the plan: for instance, ten minutes in, Sarah sits down across from David and Yacine on the subway; Bonello cuts to three separate close-ups, and when he cuts back to the wide, the former two, only later confirmed to be in a relationship, are suddenly holding hands, withdrawing just as the train emerges into daylight once more. That elegance of establishment cuts both ways—in the film's most infamous shot, showing Yacine face to face with a store dummy wearing his exact same Nike outfit, I hadn't noticed the sly slight tilt downwards that reveals both are wearing the same shoes as well—but Bonello never lets go of what now seems to me a central interest in and love of his characters, newly given resonance by his explanation of the film to his daughter in the opening of his pandemic film Coda (2022), an even more inexplicable catastrophe with devastating impacts upon the youth. It's certainly no coincidence that the two flashbacks, containing the scant contextualizing information the viewer is given, are triggered first by Sabrina staring into the eyes of the Joan of Arc statue, then by Mika pulling out his bricks of Semtex for the first time: not only are they both the target and means of destruction, respectively, but they also represent confrontations with the past, one an icon of youthful, patriotic resistance and the other an obsolete explosive developed in Yugoslavia. This patten recurs throughout the second half, whether it be through these consumerist objects or the music they listen to (the choice of Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair" reflects back society's fraught relationship with its youth with a vengeance) and firmly establishes that, for all their aspirations at a brighter future, the group cannot escape any of these pasts. As I've gotten older and at turns more idealistic and more bitter about the world and my place in it, I must say that I see myself in this film more and more, precisely because it refuses to land on any convenient point, thematically, ideologically, or even formally (there's a great deal more in the way of eerily static shots than the plethora of snaking Steadicam shots than I had remarked upon in both of my reviews). Like a ghost, it shapeshifts, seemingly inventing new, cutting details I hadn't remembered but which now cause me to wonder how I hadn't written about them, like when André offhandedly writes in a notebook his quasi-suicide note, asking for an autopsy to see whether he was mentally deranged. In the end, while all my doubts and preoccupations with influences both past and present remain, especially as the overall sensations and ambiances that Nocturama inflict within me map on quite similarly to the written experiences of others (for the record, I had no clue Cronk would be writing about coming to love another Bonello film for this very same symposium), it is these little puncta that give me a weird sense of relief. For if so many little-yet-significant details lay unrecognized for me to savor in the coming months and years, then my relationship with not only the film, but with how I and others have attempted to grapple with it will likewise be never settled. I wouldn't want it any other way.