Unlike his previous Golden Bear recipient Fire at Sea, supposed Italian master Gianfranco Rosi’s follow-up Notturno feels like a shallow adventure through a war-torn world. The imagery is gorgeous, tanbark-red flags and fishing boats against a morning sun-lit river, or the speed of a motorbike causing the brush to blur past. But it’s never enough to distract from how this needs some sort of narrative to avoid it feeling like pretty misery porn.
For a film about the marks wartime leaves behind on the occupants of the frame, it holds feeling at an arm’s length. As great as experimentalism is, these images are never made into meaning. It’s like scrolling a Pinterest board—gorgeous images of destruction that look all too staged and are never given context. As the debate of whether we can like a film with an ideology we do not agree with grows online, Gianfranco Rosi exempts his work as a public domain newsreel, saying nothing to give his imagery context.
There’s no denying the craft here, images float and speed past our eyes, and it’s a beautiful reel for the eye, at least for the first ten minutes. It’s tedious that this all feels like an introduction to something greater, the mega-long opening prelude to a great film, a story of a life, yet it remains so broad and aimless.
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This is the imagery of a great essay film, but not the experimental poem Rosi wants it to be, as poetics are meant to have meaning imbued into them, or at least enough fact present for documentation beyond that of a vacation photo album.
The commentless lyricism doesn’t work the way it may be intended, as visiting a world that is not your own and creating a travelogue should at least earn the respect for a subject’s pain to give the people onscreen a voice. It’s not that Notturno should have been overwritten with talking heads, but that it should allow its subjects to speak to the experience depicted. Rosi is known to travel and document the world outside his life, but unlike Fire at Sea’s migrants to Italy on his doorstep, he is reaching out of his world with little perspective.
It’s unfortunate that a hazy world of such perfect cinematography is left so hollow, as the presentation of pain and destruction by groups like ISIS and foreign interference feels so pretentious, like the master filmmaker cannot be bothered to take the time to apply any meaning to his images. A warm glaze washes over everything, that same yellowish tint at times of how the cinema of the United States depicts nations it believes to be lesser, maybe unintentional, but the lens tint grows tiring.
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The images themselves are incredibly evocative, but there is no story to show something that needs a story. When making a film meant to emotionally resonate, it should not be faceless, and should not be voiceless. Notturno is at best a series of powerful, beautifully-composed images, but it never builds anything from these intricately staged building blocks.
I can’t help but imagine how much better this film could be given a voice. Narration over the beautiful images, some sort of personal connection to the painterly visuals at hand could have made a beautiful final product. This “One Perfect Shot” sort of filmmaking gets tiring when the focus is solely on the composition of images, or even what each individual picture evokes, and a thread to tie it all together could have alleviated the dryness of a film so heavily concerned for craft that it forgets that we are supposed to get something out of a viewing experience. It’s a shame that, for all his talent directing reality, there is no direction to Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno, merely tourism in a part of the world he never tries to interpret or converse with.
