The counterculture era yielded numerous Biblical allegories and nuclear-apocalypse meditations, so The Noah—which combines these tropes—rose from its moment’s zeitgeist. Yet one-time feature director Daniel Bourla took such a bold approach that The Noah straddles the boundary separating conventional narrative from experimental storytelling. It’s not an easy watch. The Noah often feels rudderless because Bourla over-explains certain elements and under-explains others, making some sequences feel repetitive and others superfluous. Nonetheless, The Noah offers an arresting deviation from the norm—the same peculiarity that requires viewers to carefully parse what Bourla’s trying to say is the source of The Noah’s weird power.
Elegantly shot in moody black and white, the picture begins with middle-aged soldier Noah (Robert Strauss) exiting a raft onto the shore of a tropical island. Discovering an abandoned Japanese encampment, he transforms the facility into a personal shelter and spends a period of days or weeks in lonely silence until a voice speaks to him. Noah begins conversing with an unseen figure whom viewers eventually realize is a figment of the soldier’s imagination. Noah explains to his new companion that they’re the last two survivors of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse. Eventually, Noah and the imaginary figure he names Friday (voiced by Geoffrey Holder) are joined by another imaginary figure, Friday Anne (voiced by Sally Kirkland), who manifests as Friday’s romantic companion. The gist is that Noah contrives people because solitude is driving him mad. Bourla, who cowrote the script with Avraham Heffner, dramatizes this premise episodically until the end of the movie, which is so poetic it elevates everything that preceded.
Bourla’s nerviest choice, having only one actor onscreen for the film’s entire running time, tethers the audience’s experience of the movie to Noah’s mental state. Yet Bourla’s related decision to portray Friday through POV shots is iffy. Bourla understandably wanted to aim the camera at Strauss during scenes with the unseen Friday, and Strauss handles fourth-wall breaks well. Yet this method creates ambiguity as to whether Friday is imaginary or a supernatural manifestation; additionally, the combination of Holder’s Trinidadian accent and his character’s childlike speech pattern makes the characterization murky. Bourla’s storytelling is more assured during the second half of the picture, when Noah’s imagination creates a world beyond Friday and Friday Anne, although that’s when the movie really drags—The Noah is stronger when it’s stranger.
Bourla reportedly shot the movie in Puerto Rico circa 1968 but wasn’t able to finance postproduction until the mid-’70s, by which time Strauss had died. Adding to the slow rollout, a legal dispute halted exhibition soon after the first showing, and The Noah went unseen for more than 20 years. Now readily available, it’s a minor but unique artifact from a crucial time in American film, exploring such areas as the relationship between the individual and society; the ineffability of friendship; the dynamic between civilian and military cultures; and, of course, the crisis sparked when nuclear weapons were introduced to the human experience. More admirable than enjoyable, The Noah is a noble venture that rewards patient viewers.
The Noah: GROOVY
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