In Nocturnes, Henry Colomer evokes a Catalan childhood as a fragmented reverie.
Nocturnes, by Henry Colomer. French film, 1 hour 15 minutes. Rating: two stars.
What happens in a child’s mind when night falls on an era’s silences? What does he understand of adults’ stories and a world glimpsed through television’s little window? In Nocturnes, Henry Colomer draws on the rich imaginary world of his Catalan childhood in the late 1950s.
Disparate memories are brought together in nine tableaux: moments in the life of a child discovering life as one does at seven. In the fragments entitled Pourquoi and Mais pourquoi ?, he comes to terms with death and illness.
The film resembles memory. It releases waves of images from a distant past, first lived and then dreamed through repeated recollection. Small events that shake our early years become fundamental: releasing a tortoise, constructing an improvised irrigation system in the garden. These tiny adventures punctuate a childhood that stretches out and sometimes grows bored. It is rooted in a slightly sad 1950s, whose current affairs appear intermittently, often escaping the child’s comprehension. Driven by poverty, his father enlists in Algeria. The family leaves the countryside for a public housing block. Through archive footage, we watch Sputnik’s 1957 launch with the children, sharing their amused fascination with this sophisticated giant toy.
The chapters tenderly guide viewers at a spellbindingly slow pace. They are enveloped by subtle nostalgia and thoroughly reimagined memories, such as the interminable game of pick-up sticks in Une nuit d’attente. Its unreal, imagined unfolding resembles a miraculous catch. Each sequence is a poem, served by a contemplative aesthetic. The photography is magnificent, in carefully crafted black and white. Colomer explores light through delicate chiaroscuro.
Sound also contributes to the film’s poetic power, carried by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s original music and Catalan dialogue that sings in the protagonists’ mouths. The two children, Quentin Testas and Zacharie Olivet, embody the melancholy wonder of their age. Their parents, played by Miquel Garcia Borda and Sarah Grappin, admirably convey their adult characters’ gravity.
Nocturnes is more than a beautiful evocation of childhood and imagination. It reflects on passing time and enduring questions. Colomer is that child who asks at the end whether he may read a little longer by lamplight before surrendering to sleep: a way of defying and suspending time, as Nocturnes does in a delightful poetic interlude.
Marie-Valentine Chaudon
Caption: Quentin Testas and Zacharie Olivet tenderly evoke childhood in a film of spellbinding slowness.