My goals are rarely reasonable or even possible. A habit I picked up in my youth that I’ve never been able to shake. Did I pick it up? Or is that just the way I am? Or the society I grew up in? Or one of the many combinations of the two with a spectrum of results across a section of the population? Please let me blame my parents!
My goal was to watch as many films by Bertrand Bonello that I could before his new film The Beast, a loose–very loose–adaptation of the Henry James novella, The Beast in the Jungle, and starring Léa Seydoux and George Mackay, was finally released this summer.
Despite my intentions to dive into Bonello’s ouevre, I ended up watching The Beast first and could easily have recommended it, but instead I set my alarm clock and arose to watch Nocturama (2016) before the hungry mouths of my family could beckon my eyes from the screen with demands for nourishment, attention, and approval. It was worth it and gave me a topic of conversation no one at the breakfast table could relate to–they hadn’t seen the movie–enabling me to talk at them while they yawned over scrambled eggs.
The movie starts right in the action with a group of young people ranging in age as old as perhaps 20 to as young as 12 or 13. We don’t know their age. In fact, we don’t really know their motivations and never learn them. We watch them set up and execute a series of bombings around Paris before meeting up at their rendezvous point/secret hideout, a shopping mall.
I realize with so much “content” out there that the only way for most people to get invested in a movie or series is for it to be “based on a true story” or better yet “true crime.” That’s the only reason I can see for the allure of Baby Reindeer or Tiger King. Two shows I did not finish. Yet there is something melodramatic about “true crime” or “based on a true story”. We can always distance ourselves psychologically. It may be labelled as “true crime” or a “true story” but it didn’t happen to us. We’re just rubbernecking at freaks.
The coming-of-age/sex element in Nocturama reminds me of a German film that really impressed me, The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), about the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group in Germany in the late 1960s and ‘70s responsible for bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and assasinations. There’s something both films get right about the allure of group violence, the sex appeal of inclusion. Of course in The Baader Meinhof Complex there’s an ideology to contend with, which gives the actions a historical context. The only context given by Nocturama is the shopping mall–consumerism–really, the only ideology we have left. We protest using the same mechanism we share make-up tutorials. It all comes back to that great Canadian theorist, Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message.
It’s the lack of understanding why that distills Nocturama into something more interesting than a historical drama or true crime. Yes, more than just some curio in our digital stream. It’s morally ambiguous without being nihilistic and driven by great performances. Bonello uses the camera, his actors, and the movie’s soundtrack to create a portrait of youth that compels empathy without alleviating responsibility. No easy task. It’s far easier to give some back story of abuse or neglect that led these poor children astray, pulling cheaply at our heartstrings to forgive them, while flattering us, our moral position hoisted onto a cross and muttering up to no one like the supposed gentle nazarene, “Forgive them Father! For they know not what they do.”
No, Bonello does not do this. We see the pressure on these kids that we all experienced by varying degrees and how those elements–sex, drugs, authority, power, freedom–can come out in ways far worse than we did. It’s real pathos and not achieved cheaply.
My youthful huburis could still lead me astray and perhaps it will one day, but watching Nocturama only strengthened my resolve. If not in my own ability, then, at the very least, in my intuition. I should have watched and will watch Bonello’s entire ouevre, a word I once cockily and incorrectly defined as an artist’s “entire basket of eggs.” Oh, the folly of youth.