Deep in the Himalayan wilderness, surrounded by a swelling symphony of wing-beats, two figures wait patiently in the dark. Indian lepidopterist Mansi is on the prowl for snapshots of hawk moths set against her luminescent canvas, but she and her assistant Bicki are competing with the moonlight for the creatures’ attentions. As they search for the ideal vantage to increase the presence of their chosen subspecies — uprooting their workstation to test different points of elevation — the illuminated cloth draws hundreds of moths bearing manifold colors, shapes, patterns, sizes, and temperaments. They vie for space in the light, swirling and fluttering in one hypnotic, undulous mass of flickering shadows, fumbling limbs, and grasping antennae. A great deal of Nocturnes’ 82-minute runtime comprises such footage, and yet it never ceases to transfix.
The surrounding sequences, on the other hand, which capture the grunt-work of Mansi and Bicki (and later, other Bugun tribe members that the former hires as helping hands), are where this stripped-down nature doc begins to show signs of strain. Directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan make a convincing argument against anthropocentrism with their lucid and lyrical aesthetic, which surveys a diverse menagerie within environments of vast beauty and eerie indifference. The audience is tasked with sifting through its dense visual and sonic medley of varying biota, and the same can be said of its human characters.
The film’s lack of interest in these particular subjects — beyond their practical and theoretical concerns with the task at hand, and glancing acknowledgements of their lives beyond it — hampers the lulling rhythms of their project. The film tries to have it both ways: conveying its story via human points of identification without actually identifying with them; faces and voices are a means to an end, functioning as vessels for information, reaction, and poetic intrusion. Throughout the film, as photographs are analyzed in her lab and clusters of fog sigh over the treetops, Mansi speculates on the nature of her research in voiceover, vocalizing her wonder at the baffling resilience of the moth — whose existence predates humanity by eons and has weathered five mass extinctions in that time — in neat and literal terms.
Her assertion that they will also outlast us is eventually undercut by her findings, which she relays to a lecture hall in the film’s coda. Her data shows that hawk moths found in colder temperatures are larger than those found in warmer areas. From this, she concludes that they seek out and maintain an optimum temperature, which raises the unavoidable question: as global temperatures rise, and the moths continue moving up the mountains to cool down, where will they have left to go when they finally reach the highest peak? It’s the inevitable conclusion that every modern nature documentary builds toward — by necessity, to be clear — but the urgency of this dangling thread is eclipsed by the feeling that Dutta and Srinivasan have narrowed their playful and evocative project into the confines of something more classifiable than they’re aiming for. Its final image of a moth frenetically trying and failing to scale a blade of grass, however, is a sublimely unadorned note of anguished uncertainty, emblematic of the shrewdness of the filmmakers’ aesthetic, if not the unity of their construction.
DIRECTOR: Anirban Dutta & Anupama Srinivasan; DISTRIBUTOR: Grasshopper Film; IN THEATERS: October 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
