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.