Orcas Island Film Fest Review: “1000 Times Goodnight”

War photojournalism leads to marital strife

— by Paula Treneer —

Alternating between gripping scenes of civil war in Kabul and Kenya and domestic conflict back home in luminously-filmed Ireland, Juliette Binoche portrays a war photographer torn between her adrenaline-fueled commitment to publicize the horrors of conflict while belatedly recognizing the domestic costs. Artistically photographed, with a camera lingering much of the time on Binoche’s striking face, the film “1000 Times Good Night” is a modern twist on the rather more conventional theme of career and family conflict.

Binoche’s marine biologist husband, played by Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s, appears to have grown weary of the constant fear of his wife Rebecca’s death blighting his life and that of his two daughters, despite the film’s allusions to an earlier understanding of Rebecca’s commitment to publicizing the horrors of conflict on a global stage. While recuperating from injuries received while “embedded” with local Afghan women who are prepping a female suicide bomber, the combination of her serious injuries and the distance between herself and her family’s daily lives lead Rebecca to give up her job, at least until she is seduced by promises of a “safe” assignment back in Kenya, where one again she throws herself in harm’s way in pursuit of the photographic “moment” but this time with her oldest daughter suffering psychological collateral damage.

The film is well photographed and features both actors and Irish locations of uncommon beauty, but the main character’s motivations were treated overly conventionally in Rebecca’s assertion of her need to shock a complacent and oblivious global audience into recognition of global horrors through perhaps somewhat cynically glamorous images of the female suicide bomber. The young actress Lauryn Canning playing Binoche’s eldest daughter seems quite promising, but Coster-Waldau’s role seemed to limit him to providing more of a visual presence than dramatic presence in the film.