Film review: Terror turns out to be a fashionable timepass in Nocturama

A scene from Nocturama. Courtesy Wild Bunch

Nocturama

Director: Bertrand Bonello

Stars: Hamza Meziani, Finnegan Oldfield and Vincent Rottiers

Five stars

In Nocturama, Bertrand Bonello has made a film that mixes the more police-influenced elements of Jean-Pierre Melville with the abstract beauty of Stanley Kubrick through the prism of Sofia Coppola's alienated youths.

It features terrorism, with Paris being bombed at multiple locations, but here the terrorists are not clichéd characters but alienated youth. The film is named after a Nick Cave song, after all.

The reasons for the attacks are never explained in the dialogue. We see the execution of the crime as myriad characters turn corners and walk in the shadows. They are planning something and Paris looks foreboding. Gus Van Sant managed something similar with Elephant about school shootings in the United States.

The only indication of the reason for their crimes is their targets, the Ministry of the Interior, stock exchange and Tour Total skyscraper.

Bonello makes us side with the principal protagonists no matter how heinous they seem to be or the crimes they have committed. These perpetrators commit a lot of fashion crimes – they look like hipsters out of a magazine.

The second-half of the movie is brilliant as the criminals meet up in their hideout – a high-end Parisian department store. The characters, from all walks of life and nationalities, wander around trying on clothes, playing PlayStation, watching TV and even taking a bath. Capitalism has never looked so good.

Here the foreboding landscapes of Paris has been replaced by a seemingly virtual world where the idea that everything is perfect is being sold. But nothing here has value.

One of the best set pieces sees Willow Smith's Whip My Hair on the soundtrack whilst the attacks play out silently on the television screens.

It's a slick film, with great editing and music cues, but one that takes its lead from The Shining, with true horror being the ennui of society.