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.