Notturno (2020, Gianfranco Rosi) (Patreon)

39/100

Can't say I detect much of an organizing principle here, apart from basic geography. "Night," you'd think, but at least half the film (probably more) was shot during the day*, with no particular effort made to craft a dichotomy between light and darkness that would set it apart visually from a typical war-zone doc. (There are some striking nighttime shots, to be sure—loved the duck-hunting kid's canoe drifting through what even my colorblind eyes perceive as blood-red pyrotechnic glare—but Leviathan's ink-engulfed trawler this ain't.) Nor does Rosi stick with his initial formal gambit, which had seemed intent upon making space for the viewer to form mental connections and provide emotional affect. That's an approach I sometimes appreciate—The Challenge, for example, operates much like this film, assembling discrete, uninflected images into a mosaic of sorts—but it requires commitment (plus subject matter that's more outré than demoralizing, perhaps, he sheepishly admitted). It's not even as if Rosi permanently shifts into a more cathartic mode at a certain point. He just suddenly throws in some traumatized children, gently interrogated about the horrors they've experienced at ISIS' hands, along with a mother weeping as she listens to her kidnapped daughter's voicemails, and then returns to his previous aesthetic-minded detachment, already in progress. I was at once grateful for and offended by the injection of raw pathos, but the latter response has lingered. 

* My favorite image in the movie involves the daylight view through a window in the background, which startled me at first because it appeared for all the world as if a snowy rise just outside were somehow undulating. Took me a second to process that what I'd thought to be the sky was in fact a billowing sky-blue curtain, hanging down to the window frame's midpoint, and what I'd thought to be snowy terrain beneath was in fact the actual sky, blown out by contrast with the house's dim interior. A bizarre, very likely inadvertent effect.