Before getting the opportunity to serve as the director of photography of “Night Nurse,” Lidia Nikonova had never met filmmaker Georgia Bernstein. Still, their creative partnership came fast and easy.
“I can’t say how grateful I was for her to bring me on this journey,” Nikonova said. “First of all, we became best friends. Second of all, I think we may be twins that were lost at birth and finally reunited. It’s very seldom that [I] have so much synchronicity and alignment with a director.”
The product of that creative partnership, “Night Nurse,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 26. The erotic thriller stars Cemre Paksoy as Eleni, an elder care nurse who becomes intimately entangled with one of her patients (Bruce McKenzie) when she joins in his scamming business.
Nikonova said that Bernstein came to the table with a number of visual references, but was also open to Nikonova’s own ideas. David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and Robert Altman’s “3 Women” inspired the visual palette of “Night Nurse,” as did one of Nikonova’s favorite films, Lucrecia Martel’s “The Holy Girl.”
“Night Nurse” focuses on the ever-intensifying relationship between Eleni and her patient, Douglas, and through that relationship takes a look at a darker side of caregiving – what it means to feel needed, and what type of person is drawn to that feeling. Throughout the film, but particularly in the scene where we meet Eleni at the pool where the elderly patients take their daily walks, the camera breaks bodies up into fragments, so the audience is only focusing on certain things – a hand, a shoulder, a mouth. Nikonova said that fragmentation idea is inspired by “The Holy Girl.”
“I genuinely love presenting the world through the eyes of the characters,” Nikonova said. “Sometimes, if you think about it, the characters don’t have access to everything around them … They have a limited perspective. So, a lot of the fragmentation and hyper focus of the shots comes from the fact that Eleni just walked out to the pool for the first time, and we see the pool through her eyes – through very fixated, fragmented shots.”
Nikonova, who has a background in photojournalism, brought an expertise in composition and framing to “Night Nurse” One of her and Bernstein’s biggest challenges was creating a world that felt somewhere in between reality and fantasy. Nikonova dedicated a large portion of her time to creating geometry within each frame, paying particular attention to shapes and dimensions.
“We wanted the reality of ‘Night Nurse’ to feel very unique and also believable,” Nikonova said. “I thought that depth and texture were essential to reach that experience.”
That included making sure the relationship between Eleni and Douglas felt grounded, despite the strange tension brewing between them and the outlandishness of their addiction to scamming. The camera played a big part in making the characters’ desire for each other feel believable.
“Obviously, the performances of Bruce Mckenzie and Cemre Paksoy are phenomenal and absolutely breathtaking, but we also wanted the images to collapse the world around them, in a way, and focus from this more observational frame into very intimate, long-lens, kind of tactile images, where the attention goes away from the geometry of the world and into the very essence of glance, and gaze, and gesture, and touch,” Nikonova said.
One of the most impressive moments in “Night Nurse” is the film’s title sequence, which follows a coiled telephone cord around Eleni’s body as audio from one of her and Douglas’ scam calls plays over the shot. The sequence is captivating, setting the audience up for what type of world they’re about to find themselves in.
“I decided I wanted to create some sort of fabula, or this space that doesn’t feel like necessarily a metaphor or a direct shot from the film, but something in between,” Nikonova said. “Something that’s in a liminal space, where you don’t know exactly where in the narrative it’s placed. But it communicates the main themes of the film as well as the visual motifs.”
In crafting the sequence, Nikonova said that she and Bernstein knew they wanted to use a telephone wire, which had quickly emerged as a visual motif throughout the rest of the film. They eventually decided to wrap the cord around Paksoy’s body and use a robotic arm to help the camera track the cord.
“Most of the time, robot arms are used for shots that are either not with live people or are not macro,” Nikonova said. “With live people, you can do robot arms – you’ve probably seen Glambot, or whatever – but usually you don’t program a four-and-a-half minute oner … [of] a macro shot of the cord around the body.”
According to Nikonova, working with a robot arm entails programming every camera position in a 3D space. The camera, then, interpolates those markers and creates a path – in this case, following the phone cord. Because the path was predetermined, Paksoy had to be completely still for the entirety of the shot.
“Any time there’s even, like, an inch of adjustment, our very precise map that we already plugged in and programmed for the movement [would not work] for whatever new position of the body,” Nikonova said.
The opening, the geometry, the intense close-ups, all serve to build a word that fits the story Bernstein crafted. For Nikonova, that world-building is essential. She loves Agnès Godard’s work in “Beau Travail,” and loves the unique style that her favorite cinematographers – Robbie Ryan and Darius Khondji – bring to each project.
“Every film that they photograph, they create a cohesive and beautified world,” she said. “You look at the range of these artists, and how they can create completely separate, unique looking films [that] you’d never tell were shot by the same person.”