DARK NIGHT
Claiming that the real nature of the American soul is "hard, isolated, stoic and murderous" DH Lawrence has opened the door to numerous considerations around the existential path of the American hero as portrayed in the cinema coming from the States. It would be enough to remember Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and take stock of the feature films that even under less tragic and more spectacular forms have supported this assumption to build the character of the characters and define the coordinates related to their work. Among these, the last joint in Italy in order of time is precisely Dark Night, whose title, in addition to being a paraphrase of the final chapter of the trilogy dedicated to the batman man alludes to the massacre of Aurora on July 20, 2012 when , during the evening screening of the film by Christopher Nolan, twenty-four-year-old James Eagan Holmes fired at the spectators, killing twelve and wounding seventy. Unlike the film by Scorsese and many others of the same genre, that of Tim Sutton is not only produced independently, but chooses to arrive at the final act of the tragedy with anti-narrative modes that affect the progression of the story, almost never justified by the presence of a strict logical link between the individual sequences, as the lack of identification of a true protagonist, whose centrality typical in traditional films is replaced by the chorus of micro characters who alternate in front of the mdp to give life to the existential milieu which is the mad gesture.
Debtor of the Gus Van Sant of Elephant, to which Sutton approaches both narrative and stylistic, Dark Night performs a work of abstraction - on images and sound - which, by isolating the temporal element, allows him to show it in close correlation with the mood of the characters. Expanded in its duration by the wide use of the slow motion and visualized by the forced immobility of the bodies, most of the time immotations without a reason that is not derived from the inner disorientation to which it undergoes its existence, time weighs like a boulder on the lives characters that, literally, struggle to fill the void where the mdp immerses them. In doing so, the "displacements" of the cinematographic device (jump cut and depth of field almost always out of focus) end up becoming those of humanity present in front of the lens, in a general framework of malaise and lack of meaning.
