Bertrand Bonello's young-terrorist-band thriller NOCTURAMA

Already panned on moral and aesthetic grounds by the NYT's AO Scott. I liked it very much.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4816-behind-closed-doors-a-conversation-with-bertrand-bonello

J. Hoberman:

“Nocturama, the French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s daring and controversial follow-up to his 2014 Yves Saint Laurent biopic, is even more relentlessly stylish than its predecessor—an abstract thriller predicated on its young characters’ fantasies of taking revenge on the system and, less consciously perhaps, of liberating its largesse. The terrorists are ciphers but the movie is only superficially shallow. At once timely and timeless, it sets the aftermath of two centuries of French history to a hypnotic, trancelike beat.”

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/08/09/the-terrorists-go-shopping-nocturama/

The Saint Laurent pic isn't particularly good – it reminded me of Star 80 in its use of fractured narrative to give a jolt to hokey material – but it sure was sexy.

I liked it; this is one level up.

(my fave by him is still probably the bordello movie)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1660379/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm

I didnt dig this.

"Oooh Im so full of ennui, lets blow up a bank!"

Its up on Netflix now btw

idk I liked it

but MB that's a plausible mindset of such characters

also some are sketched as politically driven tho ideological bullet points are few (it's not what Bonello wanted to focus on)

I know social realism wasn't what he was going for but isn't it cowardly to strip their actions of all ideology? Especially in the second half, where the kids are portrayed as being in thrall to late capitalism/commodity fetishism. I mean there's truth in that but its a very surface level interpretation.

tremendous movie is this, nothing like I was expecting it to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSkEkN01vKc

I blame David Lynch for this.

All kidding aside, this film was extremely Lynchian, down to the important of the Big O, but only in the best possible way.

the beast >>>>>>>

It played here one week and I missed it :(

nocturama and house of tolerance are on criterion channel. i watched the latter tonight. you should watch it asap, whoever you are

all over letterboxd you will find ppl calling this guy's films "lynchian" but they don't remind me of lynch at all? like the beast obv has some elements pulled from the return but the soul is so different

The Saint Laurent pic isn't particularly good – it reminded me of Star 80 in its use of fractured narrative to give a jolt to hokey material – but it sure was sexy.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, August 11, 2017

I was wrong.

probably my favorite working director. nocturama and house of tolerance are esp incredible but he hasn't made a bad film imho

his intellectual curiosity reminds me of assayas, but even more perverted

The end sequence in a surreal red bar with a Roy Orbison song on the soundtrack/jukebox def set off my Lynchometer

The Beast in the Jungle is such an interior story that a ‘faithful’ adaptation is impossible to imagine, but I felt the Jamesian element got lost as the film progressed, to the detriment of its narrative momentum/oomph.

xpost mine, too.

s/b xxpost

This reminded me of Chris Marker - apocalyptic Paris, time travel, the Vertigo- style obsessive memories of love. I think Bonello has said there was an entire strand in 30s Berlin they had to cut - would have preferred that over the LA sequence, which didn’t quite work for me.

I loved La Bete, got no criticisms at all.

other than it was way too consistently horny!

Borowczyk La Bête or Bonello La Bête?

Bonello. Wasn't trying to be fancy with the French title, it was a French dvd rip of it I watched.

The Beast is now on Criterion FYI

Yeah! Eric wrote it about it elsewhere. Haven’t streamed it yet myself.

Just watched the awesome green screen opening again.

I always thinks she’s great, and Adele too, although I still haven’t seen BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR.

Excellent film. Bonello hasn’t disappointed me yet.

saw la bête this afternoon and enjoyed it a lot - like calzino upthread wasn’t actually sure what to expect. the pathways of love, the sense of a surface and an undertow, being submerged in a moment, or a projection and a reality. we hide these things from ourselves to avoid being found out, and when we do so, the shapes the hidden things take create… fear… la peur - a word used constantly throughout.

is the thing that is going to happen a door or an ending? the replay moments that speed up as the film progresses, rehearsals, little projections into the future, or alternatives?

and when we aim to forget, to hide, is the risk that what gets hidden is not in the end retrievable as we always thought it would be?

and if we can’t, what is our status? une poupée? and course a celluloid dollisn’t the only celluloid that famously burns like wildfire. bruler is another word that occurs repeatedly.

aside from all that though, it looked great, yes was v horny, and had a great feel and soundtrack. the cadence generally meant it didn’t feel as long as it was.

We watched La Bete last night, really enjoyed it. I thought of Assayas (which someone mentioned above) and much of the L.A. section really did have a Mulholland Drive imprint — to the point of seeming deliberate and obvious — but without (as ivy says) actually feeling very Lynchy. Like he’s playing with influences more than emulating them. And the ending also seemed like a reference, to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but again used for his own purposes — it’s heartbreak, not horror.

Seydoux is so much a doppelganger of Scarlet Johansson that a shrewd director should pair them in a Persona re-imagining.

Lol!

wow and born within 7 months of each other too —— good call

I know the challops are exponentiating but this movie is not-Lynchian-at-all in the same way DECISION TO LEAVE is not-Hitchcockian-at-all

Or LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is not-based-at-all on THE INVENTION OF MOREL.

Meaning the later thing is a separate thing that can stand on its own but c’mon.

I couldn’t stand this

Somehow both too obvious and nonsensical

I will watch Lea Seydoux in pretty much anything though. Weird that I’ve now seen her get covered in psychoactive black goo in two completely separate projects (Death Stranding the other one)

“I’ve been into Roy Orbison from the get-go, ever since I first heard Don McLean cover ‘Crying.’”

Did you like FRANCE, Tracer?

We watched it back-to-back with Fallen Leaves, which was an interesting contrast of approaches to romance. (Fallen Leaves also has that scene at the bar with the synthpop band that felt deliberately Lynchy, I guess every director has to do their Lynch tribute somehow.)

Did you like FRANCE, Tracer?

Ah, here we are.

I really thought The Beast was something else. I was a bit so-so on it at first because it's a long film and a little slow to start, but I haven't been able to get certain parts out my head, and the way it drew me into its very dreamlike paranoid-but-optimistic logic was quite something.

Also, I will never swim underwater again

yeah that's an incredible sequence

I don't think this was Lynchian per se, even though I get why people say it. The surreal dreaminess of the thing felt very deliberate to the plot in a way that felt less "We'll just stick a backwards talking dwarf in here for the giggles" way. If anything it echoed The Substance in places for me

is it optimistic? idk that i’d describe this movie as optimistic in logic or anything else

One of the three best James adaptations imo.

This just didn't click with me at all especially when it got to the 3rd act in LA

Just finished watching myself, count me in the 'damn, that was good' camp. Couple of moments had my attention waver but otherwise quite a film to see; watching on low volume was surprisingly effective, didn't miss a thing but felt it all the same. Didn't really think of Lynch -- if anything my run over the last few days of Nickel Boys, Persona and Mirror at my local Drafthouse had primed me perfectly for a film about fractured time narratives and the mechanism of film and memory, in its own turn being different from each other as all the rest were.

I'd add Hiroshima, Mon Amour to the influence list.

The Beast didn't make a lick of sense to me except as a meditation of our powerlessness as humans and conversely the power of our memories and dreams, but I really liked it, it was beautiful. I can see how Bonello was influenced by Lynch and Resnais, but he doesn't seem either of them

*like either