Notturno movie review & film summary (2021)

To be fair, Rosi’s aim is exactly to ignore political motivations. In the press materials for “Notturno,” Rosi explains that his documentary intentionally “does not investigate the causes of conflict or the multiple religious and territorial problems at play,” and neither does the film distinguish the locations it puts onscreen. Instead, how “Notturno” jumps between countries and between communities without spelling out where they are or who they are serves two purposes. The first is to suggest the meaninglessness of borders, in particular those in the Middle East, a region carved up by colonial powers and foreign interests after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the end of World War I. The second is to emphasize the shared humanity between all of us, broadly, and the resilience and will of these people living through the age of ISIS, specifically.

Those are both admittedly worthwhile aims. Much has been written about how the omnipresent tensions in the Middle East are partially caused by the recklessness, greed, and ignorance with which the Sykes–Picot Agreement was engineered, and it was Roger Ebert himself who described cinema as an empathy machine. It would be difficult to watch “Notturno” and not feel any shred of empathy toward a stuttering child who describes fleeing ISIS, or admiration toward the female militia fighters who battle fatigue and exhaustion to hold their position, or queasy unease toward a prison full of captured ISIS members, their bodies nearly stacked one on top of each other in a crowded cell. But at a certain point, “Notturno” begins to repeat its broad “war is bad” ideology without any additional perceptiveness, and the documentary begins to feel more like exploitation than compassion.

“Notturno” follows certain individuals and certain groups who are never identified by name, some of whom are only shown in one scene and others who are returned to over and over again. This is extremely observational filmmaking, with Rosi setting his camera down and letting action play out in front of it with little to no interference, and he has collected moments that span the gamut of human emotion. In the blue dawn, groups of soldiers jog by, their chants fading away until another squadron follows behind, announcing their loyalty to the same cause. Immediately after that militaristic introduction, Rosi cuts to a crumbling prison in which a group of older women clad in burkas and headscarves wander the halls, cluster together in cells, and pray and weep over their sons who were seemingly held here before they died. It is an intimate, awful moment, and one of a few throughout “Notturno” that feels like a moment of trespass rather than one of understanding.

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