by Andreas Petrossiants

If Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent (2014) is a bourgeois wet dream drowned in champagne, acid tabs, and couture, then his latest, Nocturama, is instead a metropolitan nightmare, populated by (militant) millennials to the tune of sub-bass electronic music and Chief Keef. His displacement of the “real” in both films — the life of a tortured celebrity/mythical figure in the former, and the tragically familiar coordinated violence of our present moment in the latter — are composed in a similar aesthetic: sexy, elegant, and meticulously choreographed.