Day 16. Nocturama (2016)

Nocturama

Trailer

https://youtu.be/H-6EEsn3Akc

Available on Netflix & AmazonPrime

Year

2016

Director

Bertrand Bonello

Synopsis

Paris, one morning. A group of young people from different backgrounds.
They launch into a strange ballet in the metro tunnels and the city's streets.
They seem to follow a plan. Their gestures are precise, almost dangerous.
They converge towards the same point, a department store, at the moment it is about to shut.
Night begins.

Honours/Awards

• San Sebastian Film Festival 2016, SIGNIS Award
• Mar del Plata Film Festival, Special Mention for Best Cinematography
• Lumiéres 2017, nominated for
• Best Film
• Best Director
• Best Cinematography

Adèle’s role

La jeune femme au vélo. Young woman on a bike.

Excerpts from article

As she appears only in a cameo role, Adèle is generally not mentioned in film reviews.

“Adele Haenel makes a cameo, to deliver the line Nocturama is built upon, in the middle of the film as a girl on a bike in the middle of the night. Bored David (Oldfield), one of the babyfaced terrorists, sneaks out of the department store to smoke a cigarette, runs into her and talks to her. ‘It had to happen. And now it did’.”

https://screenanarchy.com/2017/08/review-nocturama-bertrand-bonellos-controversial-cinematic-stunt-is-not-as-scary-as-reality.html

Comments

Adèle has only a cameo in this film (one scene). The credits say: “and the participation of Adèle Haenel”. The film was included in our festival because Adèle has chosen to work with Bertrand Bonello twice (L’Apollonide, 2012) and this film. If she works with a director twice then I think watching a movie by that director with only one scene of Adèle is worthy of inclusion here. Adéle & Céline are my guides to French cinema—I try to check out the films of those they choose to work with. If they work with someone twice, then that is a big stamp of approval.

• Vincent Rottiers, who was Adèle’s co-star as a child in Les Diables (2002) stars in this film, though they do not share a scene.
• Christel Baras was the casting director for this film. Christel was also casting director for Les Diables, Naissance des Pieuvres and a number of Adèle’s short films.

If you can't view the film, this pretty much sums up Adèle's role

Article: Adèle Haenel in Cameo

"Adèle Haenel, who had previously worked for Bonello  in 2011 on L'Apollonide, makes a cameo in Nocturama as a young woman on a bicycle chatting quickly with David (Finnegan Oldfield). The director, who knows the actress very well, wanted to make her appear in his film because he was sure that if an event of the same kind happened in Paris, Adèle would take her bike and go to see what is going on in the field."

http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-231885/secrets-tournage/

Rewatch Notes

Unlike most of Adèle’s films, which I have watched many times, this is only my second viewing of Nocturama. Before watching it, I read around the film to prepare the notes for the film and watched interviews with Bertrand Bonello discussing the film. One thing to thank his distributors for is that, unlike many French films, there is a 21 minute interview with Bonello on the DVD and it has English subtitles, and the bonus material also includes two of his short films (15 mins and & 21 mins). This is the most generous amount of ‘DVD extras’ of any of Adèle’s films (it also come with a little booklet of interviews & information). For most of them all you get is the trailer for the film and a bunch of trailers for other films of that distributor (note: the Alyah DVD also included a short film). Some DVDs include an interview, but they have not been subtitled into English, even though it is the English-language release of the DVD (In the Name of my Daughter I am looking at you!). Others, such as the Portrait of a Lady on Fire Australian DVD release had as the sole ‘DVD extra feature’ the trailer for the film, which is freely available online anyhow. The French version has lots of extras, and it has been publicised that the US version will have some (so there is another purchase…).

Bonello wrote this film while working on L’Apollonide (2010-11) and circumstances in Paris shifted between writing and the release of the film, with a number of terrorist attacks in Paris happening even as the film was in post-production. There are a couple of similarities with L’Apollinide—the second part of Nocturama has a limited number of people in a closed and artificial environment that feels quite claustrophobic, with lots of waiting around. The other similarity is the casting process that Bonello went through. Casting took about nine months and, like L’Apollonide, Bonello chose a mix of professional actors and some new to acting. He also made sure that the actors he chose fitted together in exactly the way he wanted them to, like L’Apollonide, where he said that selecting the last few actresses took a long time, because he needed to choose women who fitted into the group that he had created. In the interview on the DVD he refers to this as selecting different flowers that, when put together, make a beautiful bouquet. The name of the film comes (with permission & thanks in the credits) from Nick Cave’s album of that name.

Nocturama is in two parts—the first section is in daylight, is external, and driven, with the various characters travelling to their destinations and their tasks. There are a dfew flashbacks that fill in some, but not all gaps. We are not privy to the deliberations of the team on their reasons, though, as Adèle’s character says: “It was bound to happen”, so the driving force behind their reasons for action is meant to be self-evident. (As many haven’t yet seen this film, I’ll try to avoid spoilers.) The second part is internal, at night and limited actions, or tasks.

The original music in the film is composed by Bertrand Bonello—talents are not distributed evenly, and he got clearly more than a fair share! As well as the original music, which is great, there is a great selection of music played. Notable is Shirley Bassey’s rendition of ‘My Way’, which is lip synched by a character and ‘Call Me’ by Blondie (a personal favourite) which blasts out as another character dances her heart out, much in the same way that the folk in BPM danced to celebrate life, to mourn, and to forget. Music is a great feature of this film.

Adèle appears at 1h25:35 and is gone by 1h27:00. She is, of course, great in this small cameo role. Through watching (almost) all of her films (I’m only missing a couple of TV films and am trying to chase them down) and then following up of directors that she has worked with I’m having a great journey into French auteur cinema. I have just ordered a couple more of Bertrand Bonello’s films to continue my education in this area.

Credits

In the press pack Adèle is credited as  “and the participation of Adèle Haenel” and in the film’s credits it is “et la participation amicale de Adèle Haenel” (“and the friendly participation of Adèle Haenel”

Other thoughts

Doing French lessons daily and watching at least one film in French each day are complementing each other in getting me to understand about as much French as the average 8 month old baby. But that’s more than I understood after four years of French at school! Languages were definitely not my forte (I went for the sciences instead).

I have realised that I have written more about this film than for most; and Adèle is barely in it. I think when the film festival is over I will go back over the films and write some more on each. At the moment I’m cranking through a film each day, later I’ll have time to reflect and write more. This is a great confi-project!

Spoiler alert—skip the next bit if you want to avoid knowing key plot points.

Lines in Adèle’s scene

Adèle is the girl on a bike (GoB)

Dude:              Excuse me. Got the time?

Girl on bike:    No, sorry.

Dude:              Do you know what happened today? I’m a bit lost.

GoB:                I don’t know much. Several simultaneous bombs, fires… It seems calmer now. Some people are over the moon. And then you see others in tears. They says it’s war. But I think it’s over now.

Dude:              Do they know who did it?

GoB:                They’ll be found. No one’s claimed anything. The PM says there are serious leads. But he won’t say more. He just said they may not be foreign. But, quite frankly…

Dude:              What?

GoB:                It was bound to happen, right?

Dude:              I dunno. I guess.

GoB:                You bet. It had to happen. It really had to happen. And now it has.