Nocturama, the delicate labyrinth of understanding how much of the enemy is in ourselves.

“… it is necessary to know how much we have been instrumented, eventually, by the power of integration …” Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Freedom is a conceptual utopia for young people of this generation, although it may have always been. The complicated thing, now, is to understand the idea of ​​freedom, when it has been perversely linked to consumption and the body, in the society of marketing and optimization.

“… Blockages, weaknesses and errors have to be eliminated therapeutically in order to increase efficiency and performance … The neoliberal regime introduces the era of exhaustion. Now the psyche is exploded. Hence diseases such as depression and burnout syndrome accompany this new era … The permanent personal optimization, which coincides totally with the optimization of the system, is destructive. It leads to a mental breakdown. Personal optimization is shown as total self-exploitation. The neo-liberal ideology of personal optimization develops religious characters, even fanatics. “Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, Neoliberalism and New Power Techniques, 2014.

Thus the traits of human warmth have been removed from almost all the characters of Nocturama, but all this psychic violence finds an end. The discomfort of this orb of young people who have failed to discover the subtlety of the enemy, is discharged in torrents of blood ready. The blood that can not bear the invisible thread that confuses the desire for objects (and bodies as objects), the desire for life. Blood ready to explode.

From the beginning the Bertrand Bonello film sets in motion a surprising mechanism, a clockwork of delicately coordinated parallel events. The characters are presented in the most adjusted anguish that defines their lives, a countdown. Heir to the best suspense film and European politician, Nocturama traces all his conflicts by appealing to the most effective and precise cinematic language, with an impeccable rhythmic development enveloping his spectator in a hypnotic narrative, sharply supported by the soundtrack composed by Bonello himself .

In the development of synchronous action the first contradictions appear in the eyes of the characters. The tension of the events is remarkably elegant, the appearance of our protagonists is worthy of a catwalk, a parade of multicultural characters, appropriate for the largest houses of French fashion design. Nothing is casual in the Bonello sunset. There is a fatal connotation in its contradictions. The idea is a coordinated attack on the power of the Gallic capital.

Surrounded in a shopping mall the contradiction is extreme. What are the reasons for violent action? Does producing it save us from the dissociation of consumption? Bonello does not judge, it only makes of his cinema an implacable opera.

Facundo Torrieri

www.bunuelos.com.mx

aguilasalmon@gmail.com

BLACKCANVAS FCC, 2017