If you’re looking for a fun road movie like Thelma and Louise or Y Tu Mama Tambien, you’ve come to the wrong place. The Load is a brutal depiction of a country traumatised by war – it’s not a place where humour exists. There are no bright colours and no sweeping landscape shots. No one really knows what they’re doing, and there aren’t any dreams.
Notturno is a beautifully shot documentary. It’s clear that each shot has been carefully set up and framed. For example, the shots of the first protagonist of the documentary, a man traveling to his hidden canoe to go hunting, are incredibly well lit in low light. He paddles out into the darkness with the reds of the night sky burning in the background. And that’s right after the shots of him on his motorbike riding to the lake, with oil rigs spurting flames behind him. This film is full of incredible images of the borderlands between Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon.
However, because it’s so well shot, the documentary kind of feels a bit staged. Everything shot feels like it has been planned. It feels like the director, Gianfranco Rosi, has asked the people he’s shooting to wait for him to set up the camera before they move around, as his camera captures them so perfectly from a distance. He seems to know where they’re going. So even if it’s not that obvious, you can feel the faint presence of the director slightly disrupting their lives which makes Notturno feel less natural.
Because you can feel the director’s gaze, Notturno also feels a bit exploitative at times. The shots of poverty and buildings in ruin are what western eyes expect to see from the war torn Middle East. These images are complemented by a few displays of trauma from mothers who’ve lost their children and children who have lost their mothers. They’re opportunities to tug on the heartstrings of western audiences and emphasize the tragic cycle of war the region is stuck in. But these images don’t always feel organic. The scene with the children running through their memories feels more like the rehearsals for a local stage show that appear in the movie. Both are designed and practiced to illicit an emotional response.
That being said, the film does offer something western audiences might not expect to see: the empty silence of the borderlands. Instead of ISIS and armies, the majority of the shots feature vast open spaces explored by a few local hunters. Soldiers watch the landscape, but nothing happens. There are of course the signs of war, but no evidence of it existing in the present. As a result, it feels a bit like the photographer’s quest to shoot the Franco-Mexican War in Towards the Battle and Robert Fisk’s search for the Middle Eastern front lines in This is Not A Movie. Rosi has arrived in a war torn region to perhaps shoot the war, but the war has disappeared. Instead he finds an empty land waking up to be interpreted by his own gaze.
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