Description: A gripping drama that follows a young suicide bomber on her mission to wreak havoc in Times Square. It is not known who she represents or what she believes in, but she believes in her mission absolutely.
When Hannah Arendt coined the expression "the banality of evil," surely she must have had something like "Day Night Day Night" in mind. With chilling detachment, this brilliant and terrifying film chronicles the last 48 hours in the life of a potential suicide bomber. It is a topic rife with all sorts of potential pitfalls, both political and cinematic, yet the movie succeeds as a work of art because it never resorts to sensationalism or exploitation to get its point across.
Filmmaker Julia Loktey has deliberately eliminated any back story that might explain why a beautiful young girl like "Leah" would be willing to perform an action as inconceivable and incomprehensible as the one she has planned here. The whys and the wherefores are really of little concern to Loktey. Instead, she has chosen to concentrate on the almost strikingly banal, step-by-step process "Leah" must go through to complete the deed. Indeed, it's amazing how, through context alone, even the most mundane of actions - brushing one's teeth, taking a bath, clipping one's toenails - can suddenly become imbued with the most terrifying significance and sense of foreboding. It's almost as if "Leah" is trying to hold onto a sense of normalcy for as long as she can, savoring the minor pleasures of life that she knows she will never experience again. In fact, in the stunning final half hour of the film, as "Leah" roams around the streets of New York City trying to summon up the courage to fulfill her mission, she begins to cling more and more to the simple joys of life - a mustard-covered pretzel, a candy apple - before taking that final plunge into the abyss. What's particularly disturbing is how unfailingly sweet and polite "Leah" is to the people around her - be they the common pedestrians or storekeepers who could easily become her victims, or the masked men who calmly, almost apologetically, feed her instructions on what she is to do when the fateful moment arrives. The scene in which they dress "Leah" up in terrorist garb and methodically "direct" her for a video that will be released after her death is one of the most chilling in the entire film.
Luisa Williams, who is never off camera for a single moment in the film, delivers an astonishing tour-de-force performance that is guaranteed to leave the audience stunned into silence. With very little in the way of dialogue to work with, Williams is forced to rely almost exclusively on facial expression and body language to convey a wealth of emotion. The incongruity between the character's sweet personality and demeanor and the horrific act of violence she is about to commit throws us completely off balance and makes us call into question our own perception of the world and the way it works.
Loktey employs documentary-style realism to tell her story, using her camera to record, almost as a dispassionate observer, the events as they unfold in the course of that 48-hour period.
"Day Night Day Night" contains more nerve-wracking suspense than a boatload of standard thrillers, yet it is a suspense that is honestly earned, for Loktey never stoops to implausible timing or hokey contrivance to create her effect. This is the stuff of real life - with all its attendant unpredictability and ironies - unfolding before us. We are forever focused on this young lady, who remains a fascinating and terrifying enigma throughout the entire hour-and-a-half that we spend with her.
Stated simply, "Day Night Day Night" is one of the most riveting and important releases of 2007.
I want my 94 minutes back I had high hopes for this movie, considering it was a 2007 Independent Spirit Awards nominee; it didn't win and maybe I should have known then that the movie was a close but no cigar film. I was ready for something gripping, intense, edge-of-your-seat type portrayl of someone about to commit an act of terrorism. Instead I was bored with the tedium, over extended scenes where the point is made, again and again and again, I might as well throw in one more again just to emphasize the point; just in case you didn't get it. One such scene was where the fellow hooded terrorists have her repeat her new identity over and over for what seems like fifteen minutes but was probably more like five at the most. Other examples of this tedious attention to detail were the scenes when she is eating. Seriously I do not need to see every little bite. Now let's talk about the sondtrack. Am I boring you? Sorry, I am just trying to convey some of the feel of the movie, booooooring. Oh yeah ,the soundtrack; there is none except raw sounds of Times Square and mumble jumbo hotel talk that is hard at times to understand because of the accoustics of the "reality" sound. The first half of the movie, while she is preparing for her mission, is a snorefest. It only livens up somewhat when she hits Times Square and you hear distant conversations, blaring horns etc. In spite of the ordeal she is involved in their is very little tension felt by the audience, well, at least not by my wife and I. The tension is created by the sound of humanity on Times Square. Maybe I missed something intellectually in this movie but I was very dissapointed. A previous reviewer staed that you will either love or hate this movie. Count me on the hated it side.I don't usually feel this way but at the end of the movie I wanted my lost 94 minutes of life back. Good luck with this "existential" indie flick.
This is probably a love it or hate it film "Day Night Day Night" seems the sort of movie that will polarize viewers. Some will love it while others will find it unbearable. I'm in the former group. The plot, alas, has been inaccurately described here by another viewer. Unfortunately, I cannot correct the error since doing so would reveal a major spoiler. I'll cite the relevant plot points.
A young woman, superbly portrayed by Luisa Williams (Chacun Son Cinéma), arrives in an American city and is picked up by a man who takes her to a hotel. She is soon visited by three men, who prepare her to be a suicide bomber. The remainder of the film deals with the woman's quest.
Describing the plot, however, is grossly insufficient. "Day Night Day Night" is an extremely slow movie, and that slowness is a huge part of the point. The camera lingers on the woman as she clips her toenails, washes her clothing in the hotel sink, or shaves her armpits. At other points, the filmmakers elevate certain sounds, especially the sounds of the woman's eating and of ambient conversations. It certainly would be possible to fast-forward through some of these spots without losing any sense of what happens, but to do so would be, I believe, to miss the point.
That point, as I understand it, is that the woman is human. Yes, she is planning a murderous act, but she is also human. Her target, we know, is an American city, but we do not know why. As she prepares for her attack, she does the thoroughly normal things that we all do. She bathes, turns on lights in her hotel room, and performs other mundane tasks. She is, it seems, the antithesis of Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle (from Taxi Driver). And yet she seems so calmly prepared for her mission. (Here, comparisons to Camus's Mersault in The Stranger are apt.) It is the utter calmness (and the civility she and her trainers show) that are the point.
Finally, I would be remiss were I to allow Luisa Williams's performance to pass without further comment. There are almost no characters other than the woman who have both lines and their faces on screen. That leaves Williams to carry the film. Her job is further complicated by the fact that she has very few lines for someone who is onscreen for almost every minute of the film. Those lines that she does have are banal. There's no "Make my day" or even "Rosebud" here. Nobody is going to quote lines from this movie. Nonetheless, Williams delivers an astonishingly powerful performance, expressing volumes without speaking. Her understated performance alone earns this movie a fifth star from me.
A Portrait in Hopelessness In Albert Camus's famous novel, `The Stranger,' the protagonist smokes a cigarette before he is executed and brusquely passes off any attempts to distract him from his last little experience of pleasure. That scene came to my mind while watching Julia Lokler's myopic little gem, `Day Night Day Night'. So it doesn't surprise me that, while glancing at the product description afterwards, the movie is described as an award-winning "existential" movie.
Throughout her film, she uniquely turns up the sound in the scenes that lead to the film's confrontation and climax. Whether bathing or eating an apple, we hear the volume turned up to a remarkable degree. At first I naively thought that this was random. Alternately, it either irritated me or unintentionally made me laugh, but I soon discovered the movie's genius. Generically named, "She" (Luisa Williams), is trained to be a terrorist. At the tender age of 19, she is presented merely as a child, someone who is a molded "jihadist" ready to die for her cause. Sent to a motel room in New Jersey, she is prepared with every detail by her adult comrades who ready her with a bomb attached in her backpack, soon to be sent to blow up civilians in Times Square in New York City.
We aren't given too much about her intentions or motivations, but it is revealed that both parents have died, and she is left like a vulnerable child. Some of the indoctrination reminded me of the Patty Hearst controversy; even though I reserve judgment for that whole debacle. "She" is certainly younger and more impressionable than Hearst possibly was, but her isolation is clearly presented. What better way to show a potential casualty of terror than with a needy orphan? The volume is turned up in more ways than one as we come upon a martyr candidate who draws her inspiration from a desperate hopelessness.
There's one scene in the movie that I found particularly cogent. As she walks through the streets of Time's Square, she comes across a street vendor selling toy, mechanical puppies. She tenderly pets one of the stuffed toys, which moves across the sidewalk in programmed fashion. I kept thinking also of a prominent news magazine portrait of a Palestinian girl who made herself a walking time bomb, waiting to destroy and maim her Israeli neighbors.
`Day Night Day Night' is an unsettling movie that gets it right in sociology, psychology, and extrapolation as a plausible nightmare that could happen just about any where and at any time by someone who dates despair in an unsettling way. Potentially unnerving and depressing, the movie has the redeeming quality of having the audience cling to all forms of hope found at one's disposal.
Self-Indulgent Tripe Honestly, there are VERY few movies that would provoke me to write a really bad review. In fact, this is the first one in several years, and the only reason I'm doing it, is that there is one review and it is 5 stars. I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting from this film, most other IFC films that I have seen have at least not made me feel cheated, let alone downright pissed. This film is really IMHO a "non-film" - meaning that it's just basically a bunch of uncoordinated shots. (about half of which are closeups of the back of the lead characters head, the camera work is atrocious). I mean there's many films I like, many I don't, but pretty much all them at least have a plotline, dialogue, some character development that allows you to feel for the character either for or against, but this one has NOTHING. From this girl's arrival at an airport, she gets picked up by a car, (there is very little dialogue for the first 30 minutes) she goes to a motel room, is joined by 3 other characters (who are never identified, but then neither is anyone, but supposedly are some type of suicide bomber training squad.) and sits reciting her fake ID information for 20 minutes. She then is whisked away to get a backpack fitting, (supposedly containing a 50-60 lb. bomb which this 100 lb girl seems to have no problem carrying) and is then set out in Times Square to do her dirty deed.(Most of that time is spent walking around eating everything from soft pretzels to candy apples, and the audio sounds like the microphone is in the girls friggin' mouth the entire time she's eating.) I won't cover the ending, but this film left me wishing I could get back the last 90 minutes, and even more so, left me really feeling cheated because so much more could've been done with it. My guess is that this movie was shot for the cost of the video tape, rental on the camera, some food and the hotel room. Frankly, I couldn't wait for the bomb to go off. The only reason I'll be keeping my copy of this movie is for our "awful movie" swap nights with friends. I didn't like Broken Flowers because it had no ending, this movie had no beginning or middle either. AVOID THIS MOVIE LIKE STREP THROAT.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
