**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Commentary B+
starring Luisa Williams, Josh P. Weinstein, Gareth Saxe, Nyambi Nyambi
written and directed by Julia Loktev
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Somehow, Day Night Day Night proposes the logical impossibility of content-free terrorists. Normally such persons come armed to the teeth with ideological baggage (to say nothing of emotional baggage), yet writer-director Julia Loktev has decided to take one suicide bomber (Luisa Williams, billed as "The Girl"), drain her of any sort of political objective or personal motive, and just sort of follow her as she confirms everything with her superiors in a motel and moves on to her Times Square site of terror. The idea, I think, is to watch her do all sorts of mundane, quotidian things, then marvel at how they coincide with that ultimate act of violence. Perhaps inevitably, by about twenty minutes in you start to crave a little more than Williams playing with her cell phone–to yearn for a fuller understanding of her as a person. No such luck: Loktev is so committed to her minuscule hook that she empties her film of interest beyond crisp visuals, streamlined action, and tedious emptiness.
Williams proves to be a compellingly intense performer, and she's the main reason to seek out this curiosity. Her total commitment to the role matches the total (if theoretical) commitment of her character–you don't need to know anything about her to know that she's into the program of these indeterminate terrorists and willing to do whatever it takes. One is also impressed by the dialled-down nature of the rest of the production: Loktev does her best to give us chilled (if not exactly cold) visuals that suck the tension and hysteria out of what would typically be a four-alarm fire. Unfortunately, the lead actor and slick direction can't hide the fact that the film has one very thin idea it proceeds to flog mercilessly for 91 minutes. Though it is indeed sinister to see three hooded men lead The Girl through her bombing routine, it gets a bit stale as they raid her purse for clues, have her try on various outfits for the hit, and sit down with her to eat pizza. When Boring Meets Bombing; I get it. But Loktev thinks we don't, and repeats her gag well past its sell-by point.
After a while, you wonder: what does this person stand for? Although we see her and the others setting up the video for her terrorist confession, we never actually hear that confession. Neither do we hear her personal reasons for having joined this terror cell–itself an empty signifier with no fixed ideological address. Loktev's devotion to the minutia of formality and mannerism fails to comprehend that these small actions have no meaning when divorced from a larger context. Her approach misses the point no less than the film that concentrates on violence and drama–instead of providing perspective, Loktev veers to the exact opposite reductive extreme. I could call this is an intellectual sin (and I'll deal with that in a minute), but more to the point it drains the movie of interest. Once the alien cool of the motel sequences is gone, you're left watching Williams walk up and down the streets of New York with nothing to do but go to her appointed location, try, fail, and try again. Politics aside, it's pretty freakin' dull.
I can, of course, hear Loktev protesting that that's the point: that the lead-up to the most violent and traumatic events is littered with the most banal asides. In saying that, though, what have you said? That it's surprising to see a terrorist order a pretzel? That it's revelatory in some way to watch a suicide bomber adjust her tights and throw away a toothpaste tube? Loktev's approach might have been a good way to counterpoint a less tunnel-visioned movie–one that contrasted the ideals of the terrorists with the consequences of their actions. Showing that killers take dumps and read THE NEW YORK POST doesn't alone shed light on anything other than the naïveté of a director who recently had an epiphany. The whole thing suggests that Loktev is new to the existence of the small, meaningless humanities of people she's taken for larger than life; that she's bowled over by the idea says more about her than it does about her subject.
The one thing we are able to say with any certainty about violent radicals is that they don't exist in a vacuum: they come out of very specific circumstances and have very specific reasons for doing what they do. (Whether they're ever the same reasons they claim to have is, of course, up for debate and beside the point.) Post-9/11, nobody is really prepared to wade through all that agonizing muck to try to make sense of it. They want either a bestial enemy they can safely demonize or a blank-slate Other so there's nothing to reckon with conceptually. Day Night Day Night falls into the latter category. It's a film that comforts us first by acknowledging our fear of the phenomenon, then by omitting anything that could complicate our understanding of it or implicate us in any way. Focusing on useless trivia is a great way to avoid dealing with the situation while pretending you aren't–the "serious" mystery of personal ritual is used as an excuse to sidestep the more pertinent questions of who's right, who's wrong, and why it happened in the first place. Facing the facts of this situation is unquestionably painful and confusing, especially at this point in history–but in letting us off the hook, Loktev only adds to the confusion.
IFC's DVD release of Day Night Day Night is OK. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced image is sufficiently sharp but rather drab, and not merely because of its muted palette; the effect is less chillingly bleak than blandly austere. The Dolby 2.0 stereo sound is similarly adequate; one wishes for a more complicated mix to accommodate the potentially interesting room tone and street noise. The lone extra of import is a commentary by writer-director Loktev: sure enough, she talks about how she tried to efface any sort of ethnic/ideological orientation to her heroine and the terrorists, settling instead for the weird vibe of people doing picayune things before going off to bomb stuff. It's "the ordinary with the extraordinary," which explains nothing and isn't supposed to. Still, she's all business when discussing her aesthetic choices and unstinting in her praise for star Luisa Williams–which is more than I can say for most yakkers. Rounding out the platter are the film's trailer plus trailers for You Kill Me, After the Wedding, Pierrepont: The Last Hangman, and Sorry, Haters.
91 minutes; NR; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; IFC/Genius
