Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Nocturama


Among Nocturama’s visions of terrorist violence—windows blown out at the Palais de Justice, a statue of Joan of Arc set ablaze, the top of a skyscraper shattered by explosions—nothing is quite so unsettling as the sight of a lone car burning on an empty Parisian street at night. No curious onlookers, no first responders: this is terror turned mundane, the point where fear and paranoia gives way to numbness and inertia. David, one of the film’s dewy revolutionaries, encounters the wreck on a midnight stroll following a carefully coordinated city-wide bombing carried out by his comrades. Of the entire group, he is the one most unsettled by these actions, and he has slipped away from the others in an attempt to grasp how, if at all, the world has been changed by the explosions. Briefly, he chats with a girl on a bicycle, asking her about what has been happening in the wake of the attack; she speaks in the blasé tones of an opiated Cassandra about how she had always known this was coming at some point. Like so many of the characters shown in the film, she accepts the prospect of her world being engulfed in flame with the same shrugging indifference with which one greets bad weather.

Bertrand Bonello has drained his film’s terrorists—a deliberately multi-racial group of mostly university-age Parisians—of any sense of purpose. There are allusions to economic discontent and historic revolts, but the group mostly carries out its plans with an impersonal, almost robotic, efficiency. The members are conduits for a violence they neither comprehend nor fully control, as the escalating brutality of the film’s conclusion suggests. Only once the group members are holed up in a department store to wait out the post-bombing chaos does their youth and naiveté become fully apparent. As sirens flicker in the streets outside and dead security guards slowly leak blood onto the store’s floor, the terrorists marvel at the quality of the building’s sound system and playfully wield plastic guns. The stricken cry of “Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!” that concludes the film is the sound of sleepwalker awakening in a strange and frightening place, covered in blood and holding a gun that he does not recognize is his own. Everyone’s complicity in the system they seek to destroy is summed up by one terrorist’s encounter with his mannequin doppelganger, decked out in the same Nike-stamped blue shirt he wears. A martyr without a cause, he will spend his death not on the streets of paradise, but in the aisles of Printemps.

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