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A schmuck lured by desire, desire codified in the femme fatale, sultry moods in the small seaside town, all the straightforward elements of noir are present here. A duplicitous plot that backfires late in the night, a body turns up dead in his bungalow and he stands to get the rap.
Peering beneath appearances in a film noir we find no simple duplicity of course but the storytelling that creates a whole illusory life; how the mind traps us in narratives and mental constructs of all kinds and the karmic cycles spun from these narratives. We have it here.
A writer who was upstanding in a previous life, wanted to write about corruption in his town but the world conspired against him, trapping him with a false story. Now he has been sprung from prison, given an unexpected new lease of life. Life could be anything once more but that false story (the story as prisontime) has turned him into a bitter and cynical man. He now helps author a duplicitous plot for a quick buck, having succumbed to the greed and ignorance he used to write about. But an illusory plot, spun from ignorance, where people may not be the characters he thinks. This is all of course his own bitter cynicism, nurtured in that wrongful prison cell, that creates it all in the first place. None of it would have happened if he simply hadn't taken the money from a purse she left behind (to test if he's the dope for her story).
It's a matter of no small significance that hides in a noir plot like this for me; namely that we're all smart-aleck narrators in life who waste all this energy hatcheting plans, believing ourselves to be in control, without ever so much as an inkling of how it's the grievances of previous life that spin our cravings that spin the world. Ignorance in film noir is a specific kind, ignorance of the processes that create suffering.
That's all fine here but noir for me is a living genre that evolves as we do, our ways of making sense. I miss here the hand of a filmmaker who will go beyond reworking to wake up something vital from the ground. How much viewers will take to a film like this I expect will boil down to their preference for the old tropes, sex and intrigue in an amoral world. I will take The Hot Spot instead.
Noir Meter: 4/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Neo
score /10
chaos-rampant 3 July 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3498244/ |
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16-4-2021 01:12:10