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
"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 radical kids with the uncompromising systemic response to them that…
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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.
“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…
A group of young adults set up and detonate a series of bombs in Paris and then hide out overnight in a high end department store. The first half of this film that runs through the nuts and bolts of the bombings is interesting. The second half is not. The film doesn't ever really develop these kids as full-blooded characters, but at least while they are engaged in action, it's interesting. While they laze around a department store looking at stuff, it's not, and it's difficult to care about them as the film reaches it's inevitably tragic end. One of them does lip sync to Shirley Bassey and anot dances furiously to Blondie, so there's that.
A film about revolutionaries that isn't all that passionate. Doesn't quite work as a thriller film in the traditional sense but it was fascinating to me how the second half of this film almost feels like a fantasy, a distancing from the first half which is focused on the nuts-and-bolts of a terror plot. The teens at the center get more and more lost in the surface glamor of the mall's clothing, tvs, and soundsystems to the point of disassociation with reality until that reality comes crashing back with the conclusion of the film.
Why? If you're going to make a provocative film, either have a point of view, or make it REALLY provocative. Lots of good filmmaking work here, but not a good film.
How long has civilization got? We just barely survived the Covid fiasco; and now we are onto the riots across America. Turn on the TV and you will see chaos all around you! Was this bound to happen eventually? Why is this happening? What comes next? Perhaps our whole society will collapse? Then what? Do we rise from the ashes better for it? Or do we descend and devolve backward until we cease to exist? Did things seem sustainable and worth it while we were along for the ride? Or was there always something simmering beneath the surface? Some deep seeded issue unresolved, that we were all aware of on a subconscious level?
In this film, a bunch of…
C'è qualcosa di funereo, in Nocturama. Un'aura di morte che permea l'intero film di Bonello, un sentore di decadenza, di freddezza. I protagonisti siamo noi, la società odierna, quegli stessi giovani nichilisti che permeano gli ambienti odierni, apparentemente sprezzanti del pericolo, desiderosi di mettersi in mostra anche nei modi più nocivi possibili, figli diretti del boom consumistico degli anni '80 e '90 e assuefatti alla società liquida di "baumiana" memoria. E fin qui l'operazione non risulta nuova, derivante da quella Nouvelle Vague alla Godard che meglio ha descritto gli umori adolescenziali in modo politico.
Ma Bonello la svolta in modo audace: non si impervia in terreni già battuti. Sfrutta, anzi, il racconto per svuotarlo di ogni significato basilare e lo…
power through that opening act. it is very boring and kind of poorly edited. but trust me in that after that, nocturama gets good. like really really good. once the leads get into the mall, this had me captivated till one of the tensest finales i've ever seen. those first 40 minutes truly are a bit of a tragedy because this could've been one of my favorites movies ever, but still highly highly recommended.
Mon premier film de Bertand Bonello et j'ai adoré!
Ce film n'est pas monté d'une façon habituelle, chronologiquement éparpillé ce qui je crois en fait une grande force. On est dans l'incompréhension dans la curiosité une bonne partie du film dû au montage d'ailleurs.
C'est stressant, rythmé et il y a une dualité/incongruité intéressante entre les revendications derrière les actions qu'ils ont posés pour shaker l'état et comment ils/elles se comportent à l'endroit où ils se réunissent après.
La complaisance, l'excès, la mode, le divertissement est de mise, comme quoi, on est attiré par ce qu'on combat quand on y a accès?
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