The opening shot of "Nocturnes" shows a pitch-black night sky with swarms of moths flitting across the screen, both in-focus and out-of-focus: an abstracted, flickering panorama of life. The only sounds are the wingbeats of the insects: fluttering, fluttering, fluttering.
The latter will become intimately familiar as the movie unfolds. The fluttering can nearly always be heard, whether we're staring at moths clinging to a screen in gorgeous patterns that suggest an intricate mosaic installation, or at scientists watching the moths, or at a misty mountain landscape that the moths call home. Sometimes a bit of ambient music will come in (as if to amplify the feeling of cosmic oneness with the moths and the place they inhabit) and still we'll hear the fluttering. As the movie very gradually connects its specific topic to the wider world and talks about how climate change is endangering the moths (and every other living creature, including us) we hear the moths, like another kind of heartbeat.
A sound-and-light show presented as a straight documentary, but ultimately embracing that straightness, "Nocturnes" is ostensibly a portrait of two scientists studying moths in Northeastern India on the edge of Bhutan. It observes scientist Mansi and her indigenous assistant Bicki as they go through their regular ritual for studying the moths: suspending a cloth in a dark forest, blasting it with hot lights, then scrutinizing the various moths that land on it and stay perfectly still or flutter. (The fluttering, Mansi explains, is a means of generating body warmth.) The scientists talk about the different kinds of insects they see on the cloths, matching them to definitions they're already familiar with and occasionally noting a species they've never come across before.
But most of it is a pure sensory experience, in the vein of the insect documentary "Microcosmos" or the imagistic, trippy films of Godfrey Reggio ("Koyaanisqatsi"). Filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan take their rhythmic cues from the "slow cinema" movement as well as from the "Direct Cinema" documentaries of fifty years ago (like "Salesman" and "Gimme Shelter") that were content to adopt a fly-on-the-wall (in this case, a moth-on-the-wall) perspective on the people and situations that they depicted, and largely avoided music in favor of whatever sound happened to be present.
All these affinities and influences and others are folded into a unique (though fragmented and oddly incomplete-seeming) movie that will hit every viewer differently and spark discussions about its style and the methods of its construction. Some of the dialogue between the scientists feels very natural and "caught," with credibly stammering and inexact talk, while in other scenes they seem posed within shots and speak...very....slowly...with....long...pauses. Is this a nonfiction/fiction hybrid? Much of the voice-over sounds scripted, or maybe a better word is rehearsed, which is fine, but the results sit awkwardly with the naturalistic tendencies showcased elsewhere.
That "Nocturnes" takes quite a while to bring in the environmental panic aspects links it to a less aesthetically sophisticated type of nature documentary that sort of splits the difference creatively, luring viewers with the promise of mesmerizing natural beauty up front while backloading the doom-and-gloom elements of the subject then circling to a more "up" note at the end so that viewers don't feel too sad. (Something about the overall shape of the film felt "off" to me—I can't decide if I came away feeling it was too long or too short—but I seem to be in the minority on this aspect of a widely praised work.)
I suspect there'll be agreement that the movie looks and sounds incredible. Both the cinematography and the sound design would be a lock for awards if we didn't live in world where documentaries aren't quite considered "real movies" by a lot of people in the entertainment business. "Nocturnes" is best appreciated in a dark theater—or alternately in a dark room at home with either a good sound system or headphones that'll help immerse you in the purely sensory aspects of the experience.
The physical or visceral aspects of the movie might sink into your brain and change how you look at these creatures. It had that effect on me. I stopped killing moths a long time ago in favor of trying to capture them and release them outdoors, but I still brush them away if they flutter near me. From now on, I'm going to let them land on me and sit, unless I'm wearing wool. They're not hurting anybody, and they're beautiful.
