Tom
Wolfe’s prophetic words: “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the
United States and yet lands only in Europe” applies with double irony to the
violent millennials who will unleash a day of terror on the city of Paris. They
have embraced the very tactics of fascism they would ascribe to those they
disagree with, while inspiring a ruthless police state response to their atrocities.
Yet, whether Bertrand Bonello has admiration or contempt for them remains
maddeningly ambiguous throughout Nocturama (trailer here), which opens
today in New York.
The
first half-hour of Nocturama is an
absolute master class in blocking and editing, as we watch about a dozen
twentynothings crisscross their way through Paris. Although they seem to know
each other, they only make oblique acknowledgements. They are clearly up to
something sinister, but Bonello takes his time revealing the particulars.
Eventually,
we learn the homegrown terrorists plan to plant bombs in the Interior Ministry,
a colossal office building still under construction, and in cars parked along a
major thoroughfare. Simultaneously, they also plot to assassinate the French
head of the HSBC Bank and set fire to a statue of Jean d’Arc. Seriously, only
French leftists could consider a revolutionary peasant girl to be a symbol of
patriarchal imperialism, or whatever.
In
many ways, Nocturama is a withering
indictment of immature anti-capitalist rhetorical posturing, but it is unclear
whether it was intended as such. Eventually, Bonello’s crew of radicals takes
shelter in a high-end Harrods-like department store, where an accomplice has
executed his fellow security guards. There, they enjoy all the fruits of the
capitalist system they supposedly so despise, as they wait for the heat to blow
over. At this point, Nocturama loses
steam, down-shifting into a riff on Dawn
of the Dead, but these terrorists are bigger monsters than any of Romero’s
zombies.
Fittingly,
the crew often engages in lip-synching to pass the time. Arguably, their politics
is another form of lip-synching that regurgitates revolutionary platitudes but
lacks an understanding of their context and full implications. Being “against
globalization” is just the thing to be, like wearing designer urban couture.
Still, we cannot help feel the tension as they get antsy, like rats in confined
spaces.
