Nobody wants the night

(Nadie quiere la noche), dir. Isabel Coixet, Berlinale 2015 Competition - Opening Film 

by Martin I. Petrov

As Plato wrote in his allegory of the cave thousands of years ago, a caveman feels secure in the darkness, but it is the excitement of the light above that defines the beauty of his human nature. Isabel Coixet comes two thousand years closer in history to depict this exact same thirst for knowledge in Nobody wants the light, opening film of this year’s Berlinale. 

Juliette Binoche is Josephine Peary, a cultivated, first class lady from Washington, DC who embarks on a journey to the far north of Canada, in hope to join her husband in his attempt to conquer the North pole. Eliminating any external opposition to her plan, Josephine is prepared to encounter unknown to her dangers in order to rejoin the love of her life in his last journey. 

As the winter approaches and the sun will disappear for a few months, dipping in darkness the whole region, Josephine’s crew faces nature in its full force. After an avalanche destroys their equipment and kills all the dogs, she is left with a couple of loyal men and the hope of survival. Only till they reach the final base camp, from which her husband has departed long ago. 

While everyone is convinced that the only solution is to leave before the winter takes over for good, Josephine is determined to remain faithful to her will and expect the return of her husband. 

She soon discovers that she has company, when a young pregnant girl named Allaka (Rinko Kikuchi), living in an igloo next to the base, sets fire to her hopes and expectations by revealing an affair she kept with Josephine’s husband. 

The two women are as two opposite poles, with Josephine being the prototype of the American upper class madame, an educated and caring wife and mother, and Allaka is an outlandish, primitive creature. The only strong bond holding the two women becomes their shared love and affection for the same person. For the first, he is not only a husband, but also the incarnation of a bright future, a warrior and a conqueror who will grant her with honour and pride. For the latter, he means exactly the same as the light for the cavemen in Plato’s allegory - the alienated version of the outside world, the only stream of light in a cloudy horizon. 

A Spanish, French and Bulgarian coproduction, the film travelled from Norway to Tenerife and from Finland to Bulgaria, combining real landscape and studio shooting. Coixet does spectacular camerawork with stunning panoramas and a careful selection of her colour palette and filters; although most scenes are not real, staging the authentic has achieved noteworthy results. 

Nobody wants the night does not fully deliver a solid emotional dynamic and although it tackles a lot on the way - love, affection, friendship, hatred and remorse, compassion - it fails to surprise or activate primitive tenderness, as its aim is set to be. Rinko Kikuchi gets under the skin of her part, surpassing Binoche’s tearful adventure from Park avenue to the Canadian wilderness. Now it remains only to see if Coixet’s Nobody wants the night will manage to get through the winter and see the sun rising.