My Five Year Plan

This is one of those movies that’s definitely important enough for me to write about.

As I’ve been yammering on about incoherently for three quarters of a year now, I’m a huge fan of Day Night Day Night, Julia Loktev’s feature debut, which I saw at the Telluride Film Festival last September and which is now playing theatrically at New York’s IFC Center (dates across the country to follow). It is, to be sure, a challenging movie, a work that balances a thin line between seamy exploitation of the hottest-button-issue-in-the-world and a moving religious parable on the same level as (name-checking time) Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar and Trial of Joan of Arc, Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, and the Dardennes’ Rosetta. It is, to use a word I coined with reference to last year’s United 93 (and a host of other queasy films), a neo-melodrama, but it’s one with a decided sense of purpose and the good taste to texture its tension and its grounding in a sort of minimalistic engagement with popular melodramatic tropes with a healthy dose of extreme formalism, enough minute-long shots of a girl brushing her teeth to shake a stick at, and a purposefully evasive generalness to the protagonist (Luisa Williams) which both undercuts audience assumptions and allows us to understand her experiences, if not her mindset.

All I can say for those who haven’t seen it is this: avoid information on this film at all costs (it’s probably too late, sadly) and see it immediately.

Spoilers, Godforsaken spoilers, follow:

Day Night Day Night is a film about devotion, ritual, the human face, internal and external space, food, and terrorism, roughly in that order. In it, Julia Loktev displays a tremendous grasp of the medium while also showing a willingness to balance her ability to draw the audience through emotional trial with thoughtful engagement in coming to terms with the experiential qualities of terrorism. Forget Paradise Now, The War Within, United 93 (wherein a call-to-prayer over black and a few shots of the terrorists looking nervous about whether their plan will work is the closest we get to the terrorists’ internality) - this is a film that explores the sort of agonistic ecstacy of devotion to a cause and the thanatos of ritual.

Of course, Loktev never tells us what that cause is, and she reveals little about what leads to this devotion, or what drives this death-drive. In a manner that, while working on the opposite extreme, calls to mind Van Sant’s defeat of various causal arguments for school shootings in Elephant (in that film, he attributed to the shooters everything and nothing which had been attributed to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, culminating in that beautiful sequence in which one of the shooters plays “Fur Elise” on the piano), Loktev withholds all information - ethnicity, religion, political persuasion, family background (except to say that She’s family is deceased) and instead forces the viewer to focus single-mindedly on how the conscious drive toward self-abnegation plays out on the face of this young woman. To say that the effect is harrowing are a tribute to the film’s varied craftspeople (director Loktev, incredible first-time actress Williams, cinematographer Benoit Debie, and the incredible sound team of Brian Dunlop, Raphael Laski, Monique Reymond, and Leslie Shatz).