It Had To Happen: Thoughts on NOCTURAMA
Nocturama, Bertrand Bonello's potent and wildly adventurous drama about a group of young people who orchestrate a series of attacks in Paris, has ended up on Netflix following a predictably fraught battle to be released anywhere at all. It is one of the great films of the year, raising and answering questions touched on by current events and other films of 2017; its politics are disquieting in their vamping nihilism, yet they also seem to chime with the state of the world around us. How does the film fit in the world as we see it today? I'd like to compare it to a few other films in order to tease out its singularity of purpose. Nocturama is a film of French youth - and it is a film about French youth and violence, which aligns it thematically with Celine Sciamma's Girlhood (2014) and Houda Benyamina's Divines (2016), as well as Laurent Cantet's equally prescient and lithe The Workshop (2017). All four films address youth as a terrain of political displacement, ...