3.5/5
Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno is a documentary with mesmerizing and haunting sequences that unfortunately tries to do too much in the space of its limited running time. The ways in which Rosi presents these slices of life in the Middle East, on the edges of conflict, are all extremely compelling – a husband and wife smiling a hookah on the roof of their apartment, mothers and widows wailing for the dead, a young man in a boat out hunting ducks, traffic attempting to navigate a bombed out roadway – all while we hear gunfire and artillery off in the distance. But the film begins to lose the cumulative power of the images it has been building as it returns to sequences without a sense of purpose or overall structure. There isn’t any rhyme or reason for Rosi returning to the patients at the mental hospital rehearsing a play on the history of Iraq, or the soldiers on patrol, or the family whose eldest son works as a guide to hunters. And then these vérité sequences are punctuated by passages detailing the atrocities of ISIS – told by children in therapy in one instance and as a series of voicemail messages in another, all feeling a bit too manipulative in the context of the film’s other footage. If there was less structure to the film – if Rosi weren’t coming back to as many of the latter sequences and simply allowing this to be slices of life, this would have been a highly effective portrait of individuals eking out an existence in the midst of chaos and conflict. And if this was more rigidly structured in the way it returns to previous scenes or sequences, that also could have worked quite well. As the film stands, there are only moments and brief sequences that effectively convey what life is like in these conflict zone. The rest gets lost in Rosi’s attempt to do everything in the space of 100 minutes.
