jürgen fauth’s muckworld

A harrowing movie about a female suicide bomber headed for Times Square. Unlike Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, which followed two Palestinian “suiciders” into Israel, Day Night Day Night refuses to give any kind of context. The nationality, ethnicity, religion, political and private motivations of the girl with the detonating knapsack (Luisa Williams) are never revealed; at most, a few hints are sprinkled throughout the movie. We don’t even know her name: Williams is merely credited as “she.” Instead of the socio-economic, cultural, moral and political web surrounding the characters of Paradise Now, first-time director Julia Loktev focuses on minutiae: the way “she” carefully bathes and trims her nails in the nondescript motel room where she meets hooded men who outfit her with cheap clothes, a fake ID, and the strap-on explosive device, the way the organizers makes sure she wears a seat belt on the way to her attack, the way the zipper of her jacket gets stuck when she fumbles to readjust the trigger of her bomb.

The first half of the movie is tightly controlled and claustrophobic; the second half, in Times Square, is sprawling and chaotic, but no less wrought with fear. The enormously expressive face of Luisa Williams carries most of the film’s weight; it wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that the movie is her face: fierce determination shot through with existential dread. Loktev seems to be saying that death, murder, and suicide will always remain mysteries to the living, and when all three are folded into the single push of a button, we can only approach this singularity like a Black Hole. There is no way we can truly understand what led to it, or what comes after.

Day Night Day Night opens on on May 9; we’ll have a full review on About.

Day Night Day Night. Julia Loktev, 2006. ****

The trailer:

Even the Academy has figured out that Pan’s Labyrinth is destined to be a classic (it’s exceedingly rare that anything with subtitles plays at Kaufman Astoria), and so we’ve been digging back through Guillermo Del Toro’s filmography. Hellboy and Blade 2 aren’t as good as the fanboys would have you believe, and my memories of Cronos are pretty hazy–but this film is very, very good on its own terms and obviously a stepping stone to the grander, more archetypal Pan’s Labyrinth.

Part Pan’s, part Empire of the Sun, part Lord of the Flies, The Devil’s Backbone is set in a boy’s orphanage during the Spanish Civil war. There’s anti-fascist gold, budding artists, tragic love, a Dumbledore who can’t get it up, and a ghost that spills clouds of blood from his fractured skull. Del Toro’s fertile imagination creates scene after haunting scene, and the film is full of proto-Pan images that are still worth absorbing in retrospect, such as the unexploded bomb that sits in the center of the schoolyard like a freeze-frame from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow.

El Espinazo del diablo. Guillermo del Toro, 2001. ****

[tags]guillermo del toro, 4 stars, film, spain, war, children, orphans, ghosts, bombs, gravitys rainbow[/tags]