This is film noir and works from a great primary text, in fact it's Postman Rings Twice; man has washed up in a smalltown limbo somewhere in Texas, goes to work for a blonde bombshell's husband who has a heart condition. It's viscous in mood, scorching heat as you wait with nothing to do in the empty car dealership. It has a lot of latenight snooping around as passion drowns the night and makes the air sticky.
But it also has what I can always count on noir to provide and really sets the genre apart from ordinary crime; realizations about the mechanisms that create a life of suffering, how they begin in the mind and take mirrored form outside in narratives that trap us in chimeras.
A man succumbing to desire - rendered here as a fire that goes off in town and he goes to see - and how that sets in motion a karmic chain of events woven from that desire. It begins with merely being curious to see, ends with inability to escape a narrative. None of that would have come to pass of course if he hadn't allowed himself to be pulled by desire, thinking that fates are blind and he could go unseen inside the bank.
In other hands that might have been expert notation squandered in a histrionic telling, think Romeo is Bleeding. A lot of modern noir is like this, selfaware cartoons. It works so well here and to my mind it may have something to do with having Hopper at the helm, someone who has made his rounds of reckless life on the edge. Judging from the film, he brings an affinity for all this as life that entwines around you, sticky clothes on a hot night.
My favorite part is the premonition of possible lives ahead of him anchored in the two women.
The sultry femme, with the viscously furnished house of meaningless passion, the latenight encounter in the wilds. And as contrast the sweet co-worker who stands as promise for quiet love, swimming with her in the secluded pond, walking her back home in the early morning.
Hopper weaves here again the notion of a wrong perception as the early stage of suffering; a seeing that pried into her one day at the pond, snapped images of her that a redneck lecher is using to keep her trapped in a (false) narrative. His house as another space of meaningless desire that feeds off appearances, with photos of women strewn about but the place is a junk heap, the place of someone who's let himself go.
Noir Meter: 4/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Neo
But it also has what I can always count on noir to provide and really sets the genre apart from ordinary crime; realizations about the mechanisms that create a life of suffering, how they begin in the mind and take mirrored form outside in narratives that trap us in chimeras.
A man succumbing to desire - rendered here as a fire that goes off in town and he goes to see - and how that sets in motion a karmic chain of events woven from that desire. It begins with merely being curious to see, ends with inability to escape a narrative. None of that would have come to pass of course if he hadn't allowed himself to be pulled by desire, thinking that fates are blind and he could go unseen inside the bank.
In other hands that might have been expert notation squandered in a histrionic telling, think Romeo is Bleeding. A lot of modern noir is like this, selfaware cartoons. It works so well here and to my mind it may have something to do with having Hopper at the helm, someone who has made his rounds of reckless life on the edge. Judging from the film, he brings an affinity for all this as life that entwines around you, sticky clothes on a hot night.
My favorite part is the premonition of possible lives ahead of him anchored in the two women.
The sultry femme, with the viscously furnished house of meaningless passion, the latenight encounter in the wilds. And as contrast the sweet co-worker who stands as promise for quiet love, swimming with her in the secluded pond, walking her back home in the early morning.
Hopper weaves here again the notion of a wrong perception as the early stage of suffering; a seeing that pried into her one day at the pond, snapped images of her that a redneck lecher is using to keep her trapped in a (false) narrative. His house as another space of meaningless desire that feeds off appearances, with photos of women strewn about but the place is a junk heap, the place of someone who's let himself go.
Noir Meter: 4/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Neo