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The Night Watchman review
:. Director: Natalia Almada
:. Genre: Documentary
:. Running Time: 1:12
:. Year: 2011
:. Country: USA
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While a documentary aims at capturing and confronting real-life, an art film is on the other designed to make art. Writer/director Natalia Almada has apparently decided to make art with a documentary, the result being an infuriating pretentious and vapid work where life is staged to attempt to create art.
This documentary about a Northern Mexico cemetery had certainly a great premise: not only does the place look like a surreal and egomaniac ghost town filled with gigantic mausoleums designed to host guests but this also turns into a place for celebration at night, the narcos coming here to celebrate their dead, whether it means indulging in alcohol and drugs or cruelly executing enemies they kidnapped. As a link to this strange and creepy world, the filmmaker uses an old man whose job seems to be to watch the cemetery at night … except that all we see him doing is watering a dust road, watching tv and going to bed while the party is going on. The succession of those tasks actually represent the entire narrative of The Night Watchman, as we follow the man, day after day, doing the same thing, with a few silent shots of a woman cleaning a mausoleum, some workers building graves and a dog walking around being intertwined to add some kind of naturalistic dimension to the ensemble.
As you might have already guessed it, rather than offering us some insights by interviewing some protagonists involved with the cemetery - day and night - life, miss Almada sees herself as some kind of Mexican Terrence Mallick (The Tree of Life), delivering instead a fraudulent and empty piece of documentary. Why fraudulent? Because lots of sequences seem staged: in terms of visuals, look at the perfectly framed and stylized sequences involving a woman cleaning her dead husband's grave while her daughter is dancing; in terms of metaphors, the old man cleaning the dirt road might look useless but it symbolizes how he is cleaning the place from all the sins happening at night; in terms of reporting events, all the news stories about the atrocities committed that we hear on the radio have been added as a soundtrack to emphasize the impact but are not really what the old man hears on his radio in real time. Why is The Night Watchman so empty? Because by going for a pseudo poetic and naturalistic approach, she fails at delivering a message and making us understand why this cemetery is so important. What she is successful at delivering is however a great sense of boredom while being condescending to her audience - she keeps repeating the same symbols over and over again like she's afraid spectators wouldn't get it.
If you are familiar with this website, you probably already know that I usually champion contemplative and artsy works, counting the likes of Werner Herzog and Terrence Mallick among my favorite filmmakers, but there is nothing I hate more than bad and pretentious attempts at art … and this is exactly what The Night Watchman is about.
Fred Thom
 Documentaries: 1998 - 2011 Reviews
Documentaries: 2012 - present Reviews
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