Avis des critiques

It’s Bresson’s The Devil, Probably (1977) by way of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), but the clothes, uneasy camaraderie, and needle drops are all Bonello.

Nocturama beautifully and terrifyingly captures the collapse of a civilization under the weight of knowing that there is nowhere to go but down, and no way to go but in flames.

A supremely cool-headed treatment of a highly combustible subject, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama is a tour de force of paradox: a film that seems in some ways ripped from the headlines and in others stubbornly detached from the contemporary moment. Its audacity is inseparable from its insistence on abstraction, its willingness to turn what is commonly deemed “unthinkable” into an open-ended thought experiment.

Nocturama is, however crass this may sound, a dazzling film about contemporary youth and terrorism. It's the type of film that inevitably inspires walkouts due to the fanciful treatment of its harrowing subject matter. It's a film with both stylistic and thematic precedents: Bonello cribs from a litany of other directors, from Alan Clarke and Jacque Rivette to John Carpenter and George Romero, yet Nocturama is a film like no other, steeped in influence while brewing its own concoction.

One can see why Nocturama was accused by some critics of trafficking in dilettantish provocation—by conventional standards of exposition and characterization, it is deliberately opaque and packed full of hyper-stylized, self-aware flourishes. Yet such charges are rendered moot by Bonello's incisive, non-didactic observance of the myriad, often unspoken ways that class, sex, race, and gender inform the group's dynamics; and by the sheer emotional force of the conclusion.

A political film made in the manner of an American B genre special of the 1970s, stunningly cinematic in its concatenation of time, space, place and event. With a daring two-part structure: the first is all restless movement and travel, while the second hunkers down in the adventure-playground of an abandoned department store – resulting in several brilliant set-pieces, and a chilling finale.

This is terrorism as pop-art. Behind Nocturama's glistening surfaces and pretty faces is an emptiness, a dearth of conviction. This is, of course, by design. As depicted by Bertrand Bonnello, who has a penchant for voluptuous camera movements, Paris is decadent and vile. Even the idealists aren't immune to the city's sybaritic sickness. In a coruscating materialistic world, there's a profusion of reflective surfaces and no self-awareness.

The film marks a breakthrough for Bonello... In Nocturama, all of Bonello's eccentricities—even his tendency for obfuscation—are organized around a palpable concept, which is nothing less than the precarious state of Western civilization. It's supremely timely, capturing the zeitgeist better than any other movie I've seen. At the same time, Nocturama isn't a diagnostic work—Bonello isn't out to analyze the zeitgeist but rather create an aesthetic that reflects its mysteries and contradictions.

The film becomes less a dogmatic abstraction and more a New Wave-ish amalgamation of influences rendered current out of necessity rather than ideology (or the deliberate lack of it). Unique to Bonello, however, is its masterful soundtrack, usually a high point of his films. If you thought BABY DRIVER used music in an inventive way, NOCTURAMA—all of Bonello's films, really—will reveal the true zenith of such a tactic.

Perhaps Bonello brings us too close to sympathy for his devils... But should we really prefer an art that's primarily focused on what's responsible? An irresponsible art is a lively, fickle art. Nocturama is a lively, fickle film. It shakes off the cohering impulse of narrative in favor of the sensual appeal of a dreamscape. Many will be left adrift, but that's a more intriguing, productive result than leaving a theater feeling like you've gotten it all.

The political ills of the time are reduced to events without causes and without solutions, to idealistic adolescent complaints reflecting the blank moral purity of youth as Bonello himself imagines it. The banality of the interests, desires, and discontents displayed by the attackers seems calculated to turn the movie into a feature-length behind-the-scenes spread: terrorists, they're just like us.

In less assured or idiosyncratic hands, the notion of these killers suddenly transfixed — zombified, even — by Chanel, Fendi and Sonia Rykiel might have played as a cheap satirical dig, a facile reminder of the hypocrisy behind their anti-establishment rage. Stalking his characters with sinuous camera movements and split-screen surveillance footage, Bonello turns it into the stuff of a waking nightmare, complete with the occasional dreamlike apparition drifting into view.