Posts : 4151 Join date : 2007-12-15 Age : 45 Location : Hollandia
Subject: Nuit noire - Olivier Smolders (2005) Sun Nov 16, 2008 8:09 pm
Nuit noire (aka Black Night) From Olivier Smolders
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Unknown outside of die hard arthouse circles, Belgian director Olivier Smolders has been turning out surreal, often inscurtable short films since the mid-1980s. His work teems with imagery involving human skin, religious inconography, and reptiles and insects, while his formal aesthetic style immediately invites comparisons with other European (or Euro-friendly) directors, most obviously Peter Greenaway (whose A Zed and Two Noughts is an obvious influence), Terry Gilliam, Francois Ozon, and Luis Bunuel. Eventually he completed a feature-length film, shot on DV but manipulated to look for all the world like a moody 35mm film, entitled Black Night (Nuit Noire), and its release has allowed his entire body of work to finally gain some appreciation
More a dreamlike experimental experience than a coherent narrative, Black Night begins with a pair of old men unveiling a small snowbound stage with two child puppets. Intercut with random shots of insects, the story focuses in on the two children, now real, a brother and sister. After the death of the young girl, the boy, Oscar (Rodriguez), grows up to take over as an animal conservator at his father's Natural Sciences Museum, while the world has been consumed entirely in darkness except for a few fleeting seconds of sunlight each day (a device mirrored by the symbolic image of stage curtains opening and closing). One day he finds one of his coworkers, an African woman, ailing in his bed, and she and Oscar copulate (or do they?) before she dies. Then things get really strange, as his bed is taken over by a giant coccoon...
Though some critics may be tempted to find some deeper underlying meaning in all of the fragmented images of Black Night, the film really works best as a string of visually stunning scenes in which mankind and Mother Nature comingle in some sort of deeply uneasy symbiosis. The actors mainly function as additional visual objects, though Rodriguez does well in a leading role which requires him to devolve from a stoic, buttoned-up mannequin to a sweaty, frenzied wreck. And of course, this being an art film, there's a lot of female nudity, though it's rendered in a very anthropological fashion
Absolutely magnificient piece of work!! What an amazing movie! It would go maybe more into the unclassable part but it has that fantasy vibe so I think it is fine here A really nice sureal, lynch like Belgian movie. Beautifull colors and light, nice music, amazing atmosphere: dark, poetic and strange I'm totally in love with it, this is close to perfection
Sun Nov 16, 2008 8:09 pm
