Anyone who cares about the evolution of cinema should rush to see Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, which is screening all week at Facets. The film marks a breakthrough for Bonello, a highly original writer-director who’s long displayed a mastery of mood but whose movies (among them On War, House of Pleasures, and Saint Laurent) can be a little too obscure for their own good. In Nocturama, all his 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, Nocturam 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 Devil, Probably (1977), Robert Bresson’s portrait of a depressive college dropout and his circle of friends, is perhaps the most despairing French film of the 1970s. The movie begins with the news of the main character’s suicide, then flashes back to show the events leading up to his death. Along the way Bresson hints at reasons for the protagonist’s dissatisfaction with life—his despondence might come from feelings of political powerlessness, disillusionment with religion, and anger over the destruction of the environment—but ultimately keeps it a mystery. Bresson’s use of nonprofessional actors (“models,” as he called them) is at its most expressive here. The characters move with the awkwardness and put-on confidence of real twentysomethings, and since one doesn’t recognize the actors playing the roles, one is more apt to study their body language. In Nocturama, Bonello also casts unfamiliar faces in most of the leads, and he advances a Bressonian fascination with the surfaces (rather than the motives) of human interaction.
