Julia Loktev has deftly alternated between documentary and fiction in her decades-spanning career as a filmmaker, although her fiction films have always carried traces of the real in them. Day Night Day Night (2006) records 48 hours in the life of a stranger in a strange land. In it, an unnamed woman arrives by bus somewhere in the United States and is promptly whisked away to a nondescript motel room, curtains drawn, TV off. It is soon revealed that this withdrawal is part of her preparation to commit a public act of violence. Yet Loktev isn't concerned with unpacking the why and instead zeroes in on the fascinatingly mundane how. The woman is played by Luisa Williams, a Coney Island nanny who never appeared in another feature film—a scarcity of screen presence that makes her sole lead performance all the more eerie.
The first half of Day Night Day Night depicts a measured procession of small rites. Williams is visited by men whose soothing baritones and generic khakis suggest big-box store floor staff, although their balaclavas and brusque directives hint at something darker. Loktev films with the same sober passivity as the sleeper cell's normcore militants themselves, observing dispassionately as Williams is prepped and costumed—a cramped hotel-room fashion show offers a fleeting moment of levity—but never once addressing the ideology of either the woman or her handlers. The fact that both have arrived at this fateful point of intersection is enough.
If Day Night Day Night is first characterized by contraction, the film's second half focuses on release—literal, in part. Williams is delivered to Midtown Manhattan, and the city's immediate swirl of noise and humanity offers a startling contrast to the hermetic seclusion that preceded it in the film. As she wanders through Times Square, weighted down by a Jansport packed with an unimaginable payload, Williams resembles a typical glassy-eyed tourist. Yet given the context of her arrival, her every action takes on elevated significance: Why does she buy two pretzels with mustard? Why a candy apple? Does she know her final destination on this last day on Earth? Is it predetermined, or will she improvise? Loktev's handheld camera tightly frames Williams, leaving the viewer anxiously waiting to behold the unimaginable at close range.
Though inspired by a real event that Loktev read about in Moscow, Day Night Day Night is impossible to watch without thinking about 9/11, which occurred five years before the film was made. That traumatic, televised spectacle pushed countless Hollywood filmmakers toward a new era of combined callousness and apocalyptic exuberance—a trend arguably kicked off by Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007) and its startling depiction of a jet crashing through a building as seen from within. Yet Loktev’s film takes the opposite approach: CGI-free and grounded, it isn't interested in repeating or expanding upon triggering imagery, but in the effect that imagery has on those who witness it, characters and audience alike.
Day Night Day Night screens this evening, September 21, and on September 26, at the Roxy on 35mm as part of series “2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die.”
