Interview. Julia Loktev.

"Now opening, rather portentously, in the city of its conception, [Julia] Loktev's fiction film debut Day Night Day Night is evidence of a director clearly committed to an idea and its execution. The film is a viscerally wrenching but never hyperbolic examination of an unnamed female suicide bomber who, over the film's titular course, prepares to carry out her mission in the heart of New York City." Jay Kuehner introduces his interview with the director.

"Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating movie," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "However low-budget and minimalist, this digitally shot, quasi-guerrilla production is a new-style disaster flick—as experiential in its way as the ritual ordeal provided by United 93... The movie has nothing to do with the psychology of the suicide bomber and everything to do with the psychology of the spectator." Also, Julia Wallace has 5 questions for Loktev.

Updated through 5/15.

For R Emmet Sweeney, writing for the Reeler, the film "recalls everything from Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc (the use of faces) to the Dardennes' Rosetta (the attention to local detail), but it is most clearly aligned with Bresson's A Man Escaped. Both films use non-professional actors and employ sound to motor the narrative, shaping it to create tension from off-screen footfalls and nervous exhalations. They run on inverted narrative paths, however, as Bresson heads toward freedom and a type of grace, whereas Loktev barrels toward negation."

"The enormously expressive face of Luisa Williams carries most of the film's weight; it wouldn't be much of an overstatement to say that the movie is her face: fierce determination shot through with existential dread," writes Jürgen Fauth.

"No doubt that Loktev's intellectual approach to the material was honorably trying to skirt sensationalism, preferring a more experimental tone, but does Day Night Day Night really bring us any closer to an understanding of our world, or does it simply approximate it?" asks Michael Koresky at indieWIRE.

"Because no details are given or motives offered, Day Not Day Night is ostensibly apolitical," notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But the deliberate withholding of a political agenda in a movie about a suicide bomber has unavoidable political implications. It suggests that the motives matter less than the self-destructive act."

David Edelstein finds Day Night Day Night "a cunning exercise in subjectivity and withheld information - and once you accept those parameters, it's riveting." Also in New York, Logan Hill profiles Loktev.

"I'm definitely a Bresson fan, but I think I'm also attracted to things that are more impure, much more baroque, and mess things up a little bit. I'm more a Godard fan," Loktev tells Aaron Hillis at IFC News.

"The authentic boldness of her approach comes from a startling reliance on deadened pace—minutes unfold as the girl clips her nails the day before her mission—and a real-time structure," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Call it 24 with the tension reconfigured through a vessel of cold authenticity."

"In Loktev's portrait, the larger meaning is nothing; the immediate exploit is everything," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical.

"[T]he How is the Why," notes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Anthony Kaufman offers a few highlights from his interview with Loktev for Filmmaker.

Update, 5/10: Andrew O'Hehir talks with Loktev for Salon.

Updates, 5/11: "Luisa Williams is beautiful and unnerving as an innocent with a death wish, Julia Loktev is a maestro of mood and tempo, and this pared-down film packs the same adrenaline wallop as Children of Men," writes Scott Indrisek for Nerve. "A director hasn't conjured a story of such depth using so few words since Pasolini's bourgeois sex romp, Teorema."

Watch video interviews with Loktev at Movies for the Masses.

The indieWIRE interview.

"Bresson's influence looms over the minimalism currently fashionable at film festivals - a trend Day Night Day Night fits snugly into - but little recent work has utilized it as well as Julia Loktev's tense narrative debut," writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. "She takes big risks but achieves a major payoff."

Update, 5/12: Phil Nugent: "Mostly it seems to be trying to make the point that suicide bombers are normal, ordinary people, and that there's nothing special to say about them as a group. I'm not sure that I agree with the first point, and the second point almost strikes me as an abdication of the artist's responsibility."

Update, 5/13: A spoiler-peppered "Shot / Reverse Shot" double at Reverse Shot. The "Shot" comes from Kristi Mitsuda, who writes, "However provocative its premise may be, Day Night eschews sensationalism." In his "Reverse Shot," Michael Joshua Rowin writes, "Held up to the real-world senseless violence of a lone psychotic, Day Night's unrevealing portrait of its would-be suicide bomber protagonist comes across as opportunistic, cheap, superficial - and completely effective."

Update, 5/15: Ray Pride spots his name up in whites.

Posted by dwhudson at May 9, 2007 12:54 PM