The Ideological Mad Libs of “Nocturama”

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In “Nocturama,” Bertrand Bonello’s film about young terrorists in the Paris region, the political ills of the time are reduced to adolescent complaints.Photograph by Netflix / Everett

Bertrand Bonello’s “Nocturama” is another August heist movie, to place alongside Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Good Time” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Logan Lucky.” (It came out in France last year and was released here on August 11th.) Of the three films, “Nocturama” is both the most and the least political. The criminal scheme on which it’s centered is not about loot but about terrorism: nine young people in the Paris region plot a coördinated series of terrorist attacks, which include a point-blank murder and a quartet of nearly simultaneous bombings, including at busy sites, one of which—the Ministry of the Interior—is an expressly political venue.

Yet despite the drama about attacks of a political nature on political targets, Bonello filters politics out of the film: the plotters have no explicit program, no stated demands, no debated or declared ideology, not even any particular expressed complaints about the way of the world or the situation in France. For the first half of the film, Bonello follows his characters in their deftly furtive meet-ups in subway cars and stations, parking lots and office buildings, with text messages checked, photos snapped and shared, and cell phones dumped in garbage cans and replaced with other burners in the pocket. Their ruses to gain access to well-protected places, partly with the help of a well-placed security guard who’s in on the conspiracy, are displayed, and a few brief flashbacks touch on earlier stages of the plot. When a murder is committed, Bonello shows the ease with which some plotters get away, the trouble that others face in making their escape, and their admiration for their own handiwork from afar.

Then, in the film’s second half, the attackers—at least, those who get away—reunite, with the help of another friend on the inside, in a department store that has been closed and evacuated. There, the young people, holed up in the store, essentially play house, using the fancy sound systems on display to listen to pop music (and repeat celebrity-news banalities about it), exchange their plain outfits for designer clothing, bathe in a retro bathtub, take jewelry, don makeup, crash on fancy furniture, and luxuriate in the wide-open spaces of the full-block-size building. One of them even sexually gropes a store mannequin, and another borrows a go-cart to zip through the aisles like the kid on the tricycle in “The Shining.” They also make use of the bank of big-screen TVs on the sales floor to watch news reports about their own attacks. (Comically, the only thing they can’t do is smoke, because of the store’s smoke detectors. To do so, they have to go outside, like any burdened employee.)

It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine terrorist attacks. They’re all too common, perpetrated in many countries by a diverse range of attackers with widely varying motives. They’re copiously reported upon and discussed. And countermeasures taken to prevent them are ubiquitous and conspicuous. What distinguishes “Nocturama” is its lack of imagination, a lack that appears to be a crucial element in the director’s artistic strategy. What if a group of terrorists had no motives—no ideological reason to attack civil society, no political program that it hoped to advance or political enemy that it hoped to harm? What if its act of terrorism was an acte gratuit, an action undertaken for the sheer hell of it, with no motive other than curiosity or existential self-affirmation by dint of the act itself?

The very concept is the work of the novelists André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work has fetishized such gratuitous and random murder. Bonello instead seems to want to have it both ways: his young plotters commit random murders, but the film, in flashbacks, offers an ideological Mad Lib that hints at what they might be rebelling against, and which viewers are meant to fill in. It is the world in which a well-connected man’s son who has learned to play the academic game can look forward to a pathway-smoothing internship with a high government official, while others work as security guards at the ministry or can’t find work at all; in which a lavish and windowless department store shuts out customers’ view of the homeless and hungry sitting just outside its walls, which defend the stuff of feasts; in which a statue to Joan of Arc is bedecked in gold while people of France go hungry; in which preprogrammed and seemingly predigested culture takes the place of art, media blather substitutes for knowledge, and the pleasure of identifying oneself with advertised luxury brands takes the place of identifying oneself with other people.

All of these subjects are worthy of serious thought and substantial consideration, in life as in movies. In “Nocturama,” all are instead left onscreen like backpack pins to reflect the director’s own concern in lieu of any understanding of those of his characters. 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—and, therefore, all of us enjoying the bland and kitschy and oblivious pleasures available for consumption, enduring the numbingly impersonal routine of the academic rat race, and accepting such inequities as unemployment and homelessness are in some sense just like terrorists.

The frivolity of the film’s unexpressed political earnestness—Bonello’s unwillingness to give voice to his or his characters’ ideas—is matched by the emptiness of its aesthetic. Bonello creates a chic and conventionally stylish drama, whirling with Steadicam shots in which constant motion takes the place of substantive action and with an unbroken realism that’s glossy with its own thoughtlessness. His film about radicals is as familiarly conservative as any routine film from the art-house mainstream, hardly different from those of Jacques Audiard or Olivier Assayas or other contemporary French art-house filmmakers who, whatever their merits, are anything but cinematic radicals. Bonello neither imagines in any detail the ideas or states of mind of the plotters nor the particulars of their plotting. The movie can’t be bothered to show the plotters’ training—to show how people acquire arms in places where there’s no Second Amendment to abuse and how they learn to use them, how they get the Semtex that’s on hand (a line of dialogue on the subject tosses off what might have been the best scene in a film that has almost no other good ones), or where the money comes from. There’s no practicality and no grandeur, either—no romanticism, no sublimity in the characters’ lives or, for that matter, in the filmmaking.

Department stores loom large in the French artistic imagination, from Émile Zola’s novel “Au Bonheur des Dames” to Jacques Tati’s comedy in “Playtime” to Leos Carax’s settings in “The Lovers on the Bridge” and his use of the interiors of the closed Samaritaine store in his 2012 film “Holy Motors” (a rapturous scene that features Kylie Minogue). The department store is the closest thing to a setting and a situation that sparks Bonello’s imagination, though the relative variety of incidents that the young people whip up there to occupy their fearful and suspenseful hideout, including one man’s lip-synch to Shirley Bassey’s rendition of “My Way,” isn’t filmed with any particular flair or originality. Bonello can only imagine the ordinary because his imagination is painfully ordinary; the banality of the terrorists in “Nocturama” isn’t a reflection on a banal society but on the banality of his own filmmaking skills. His filming of revolution is in no way revolutionary.

The great movie of revolutionary young people, Jean-Luc Godard’s “La Chinoise” (which, for its fiftieth anniversary, played this summer at the Quad), is, by contrast, as much a work of aesthetic revolution as of political revolt. To depict a deadly act of political terrorism, Godard sacrifices any sense of a system, of a code of references, of a tradition, even of personal artistic pleasures and inclinations. The result is an unsparing challenge to cinematic styles and forms, as much an act of potential artistic self-destruction as a depiction of political violence. By contrast, “Nocturama” is an act of vanity, in which Bonello elevates his own familiar and unquestioned cinematic system through his pseudo-political, pseudo-radical, pseudo-social display. He’s filming from behind the shatterproof protective glass of his own lenses, shutting out any noise from outside—and, even more, from inside his own head—with the hermetic walls of his own luxurious means and comfortable modes of production.