A Thousand Times Goodnight
Director: Erik Poppe
Starring: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Juliette Binoche
117 mins; Class 15;
KRS Film Releasing
The opening credits unfold over a pitch-black screen with a mere sliver of daylight bouncing with dust particles flitting across it.
We soon realise it is Rebecca’s (Juliette Binoche) point of view as she sits huddled in a van, her destination unknown. The van stops in open desert and Rebecca jumps out, camera at the ready, as she witnesses a group of women praying around a hole in the ground.
It is a burial of sorts, and as Rebecca photographs the woman lying at the bottom of the hole, to our surprise, the woman’s eyes open. The woman is then gently guided indoors and undergoes a solemn and staid ritual where she is carefully bathed, made up and dressed by the other women.
It is only a fleeting glance at the explosives-laden vest her entourage put on her that the full horror of what our protagonist is witnessing really hits home.
This scene and what follows as the bomber makes her way towards her intended target is an immensely powerful and chilling opening to A Thousand Times Goodnight, a drama anchored by a superb performance by Binoche.
Rebecca is a woman torn between her career and her family. But Rebecca has no ordinary career – she is a photojournalist who travels to the world’s most dangerous war zones. In her efforts to capture her shots, she often flirts with death, as attested when the aforementioned assignment throws her directly in the line of fire.
On recovering from her serious injuries, Rebecca returns home to Ireland to her husband Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and her two teenage daughters Stephanie and Lisa (Lauryn Canny and Adrianna Cramer Curtis).
A fascinating moral dilemma that lingers long in the mind
Yet, despite the emotional welcome, Marcus gives her an ultimatum – quit her job or he will leave with their two daughters, the family unable to withstand the tension any more of not knowing whether she will come home alive whenever she is away.
Rebecca is faced with a classic dilemma, and it is a dilemma whose complications are brought to life in Binoche’s soulful, passionate and mesmerising performance.
She hits all the right notes as Rebecca struggles with her conscience throughout, desperate to make the right decision, to reclaim Marcus’s love that she feels she is losing, while trying to connect with her daughters.
Binoche is backed up by a solid performance by Coster-Waldau as a loving husband and father trying to protect his family, and newcomer Canny as Stephanie, Rebecca’s intelligent and perceptive teenage daughter. U2’s Larry Mullen Jr has a small cameo as Rebecca’s friend Tom.
The film is directed with a keen sense of the dramatic and the emotional by Norwegian Erik Poppe, from a script by Harald Rosenløw Eeg.
The excellent script not only offers a fascinating storyline with the script’s central premise and an ensemble of three-dimensional characters, but by balancing Rebecca’s home life and examining her career up close, it also brings to light the role of photographers and journalists like Rebecca in the centre of areas of conflict.
Are they complicit in the action if they photograph an event that will ultimately result in the death of innocents? It certainly throws up a fascinating moral dilemma whose complexities linger long in the mind.