2016 Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Paris, one morning. A group of young people from different backgrounds. They launch into a strange ballet in the metro tunnels and the city's streets. They seem to follow a plan. Their gestures are precise, almost dangerous. They converge towards the same point, a department store, at the moment it is about to shut. Night begins.
Paris Is Happening, Paris est une fête, Ноктурама, 夜行盛宴
High speed and special ops Politics and human rights political, documentary, president, democracy or propaganda terrorism, thriller, gripping, intense or political spy, agent, intrigue, thriller or suspense action, explosives, action-packed, exciting or villain emotion, storytelling, powerful, complexity or captivating Show All…
"it was bound to happen, right?"
fuelled by bonello's deft and rhythmic compositions/editing, that find structurally and geographically interesting ways to thrill & comment simultaneously as he tracks 7 kids carrying out a paris bombing (there's a repetition of gunfire with constantly shifting visual information in the climax that so simply yet viscerally captures a sense of inevitability that my jaw actually dropped), this is a desperate cry for young people without genuine avenues of expression, political and otherwise, and wholly essential cinema. the extended, uneasy opening that lingers on the mundane, ordinary methodology of the homegrown terrorists is incredibly thrilling but the back half that meditates on the aftermath—contrasting these frustrated, radical kids and their world of hollow, commercial surfaces…
98
A deconstruction of process. Observe as everything goes according to plan and watch as inevitability winds down like an alarm clock, enclosing success and failure in a vast, single environment, where death floats over as specter to the very consumerist fascination in which these youth embrace. Astounding cinema, with indelible musical cues, spatial magnificence, and a total horror display of an ending being only a few of its endless contradictory pleasures. A must-must-must see.
Sort like a French rework of Van Sant’s Elephant with the obsession with death and youthful waste replaced by an obsession with been fashionable. The political limits of current cinema love for surface abstraction laid bare. The empty out surface is the point, but it often feels little more than a cowardly retreat in face of a country psychosis.
never thought i would get to say this about a film but this has the single scariest usage of "whip my hair" by willow smith and that in itself is an achievement
“We did what we had to do,” argues one of the beautiful terrorist teens in Bertrand Bonello’s “Nocturama,” a vague and intriguingly inert thriller that waits 50 minutes before revealing “what they had to do” and never bothers explaining why they had to do it. It’s hypnotic all the same. Fresh off his emotionally extravagant biopic of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, Bonello has returned with another film about the seductive power of surfaces. With his previous project, he presented that idea as his subject — with this one, he sublimates it directly into his style. The result is a portrait of radical violence that has almost no resemblance to terrorism as we know it, and yet sometimes feels all more accurate because of that.
Reactionary nonsense. It can be VERY impressive formally but it's ideas are so simplistic and for all the wrong reasons..it should have been a straight-genre picture, but these kinds of generational/current events films are never trustworthy. Politics for people who don't think about it. Politics for people who don't read books. It's basic premise is a slightly idiotic contradiction: communism + genre, yet genre only exists because of the marketplace..
Still - maybe I'm being a bit too harsh: the film comes alive in the backhalf, but only because the emphasis on empty reflections is mirrored by the shopping mall setting. But this is only a success on an aesthetic level: stripped from its "current events" plot, the film is…
Hop up out the bed turn my swag on
Pay no attention to them haters cause we whip 'em off
And we ain't doing nothing wrong
So don't tell me nothing, I'm just tryna have fun
So keep the party jumping
L'AUBE DES MORTS
"It's weird doing nothing." Captures both the staggering sense of potential and the simultaneous, paradoxical tunnel vision of modern engagement with reality. It's a film very much "of the now," not in some lame zeitgeist-y manner, but in the way it captures a specific outlook, a way of seeing. Call-backs to Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Comet aren't trite commentaries on consumerism or radicalism or whatnot, but more ambitious abstractions of an inescapable, atomized mode of experience. It's how the notion of the progressive "now" - note the alternate title: Paris est en Fête - has become warped because of individualized context. ("She was only ten when she sang this. Seen the video? It's totally sick," says…
[77]
Took me longer than I care to admit to decipher NOCTURAMA's true intentions, only aided by knowing next to nothing about it beforehand other than "terrorism." Anyone who's seen it, though, should be able to ascertain that "terrorism" is not the point -- and to a large degree, neither is realism -- despite a thrillingly wordless opening sequence that might hint otherwise, calling to mind both THERE WILL BLOOD and RIFIFI with its marvelous, silent tension. The film gets less and less pragmatic and very nearly approaches downright absurdist territory (or, at the very least, a complete absence of logic), and what started as a gripping -- if completely mystifying -- execution of best-laid plans becomes a Cubism-level appraisal…
Fredo in the cut,
that's a scary sight
You not with the six
you can die tonight
I only want the top,
I ain't tryna pipe
Them young guns with the shits,
they be totin' pipe
Floatin' off at flat,
I might take flight
3hunna, bitch, we hot,
we done took flight
Dawn of the Dead, very obviously, but with the zombies - who spend the first half walking, walking, walking down the streets and subways of Paris; they really are the walking dead - now on the inside, trying on the lineaments of capitalism without seeming to worry overmuch about betraying their ideals (because they don't have any?). "It was bound to happen," says a girl on the street, 'it' being domestic terrorism - a college intellectual puts it more floridly: "Civilisation is a condition for the downfall of civilisation" - which could also be taken to imply that it hasn't happened yet, i.e. that the film isn't about the extremist terrorism we're seeing now but a possible next stage, when…
