4 films: Miller’s Crossing to Der Krieger und die Kaiserin
Miller’s Crossing (Joel Coen, 1990). A power-behind-the-throne gangster has a fallout with his boss, joins the opposition and plays the two sides against each other. The film reminded me of the great samurai film Yojimbo (1961), with its cool main character that inexplicably is a hero. What makes him successful is his belief that everyone does everything for a reason and what saves him is that no one can figure out his reasons, maybe even not himself. A good film with the main character always one step ahead of the audience and two steps of everyone else in the picture. [8/10]
Hable con ella (English title: Talk to Her) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002). Two men are united by caring for women they like at a coma ward in a hospital. One of them is a nurse that takes care of a woman he was secretly in love with before her accident and the other is the boyfriend of a female bull fighter. As I’m a vegetarian and generally nice to animals I hated the bull-fighting scenes because of the pointless cruelty. I didn’t really connect with any of the characters of the bull-fighter couple, and that made me feel less connected to the story as a whole. The bull fighter’s boyfriend was a writer of some kind, but you never see him work. That makes him feel more one-dimensional as you don’t know what kind of person he really is. [6/10]
White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949). Cody Jarrett is a ruthless gangster and a mama’s boy, cruelty and dependence in one. His gang goes into hiding after a train job, and to avoid getting the gas chamber for the people killed during the robbery he confesses to a lesser crime. But a police officer isn’t satisfied, and plants an undercover cop in his cell to make him admit to the other job. The film has multiple people in main roles, but no clear protagonist. This is a strength, as you might see the film from the gangster’s, the police man’s, or the undercover cop’s point of view depending on who you like most. As I’ve said before there are three common variants of film noir according to Krutnik: the tough investigative, suspense and criminal-adventure thriller. White Heat has elements of all three, and some elements can be found in the character Cody Jarrett. In a tough suspense thriller the main character knows less than the audience, but in the other two variants he knows more, and Cody is driving the story while at the same time getting more tangled in the police’s web. Two final notes, the first on the high technology used: the police has regular phones in their cars, they use “oscillators” to track cars by triangulation and spectrographs to compare dirt the train crime scene and a dead body. It must’ve been really cool when the film was new. Also, there’s a town called Springfield with a character called Dr. Simpson. [9/10]
Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (English title: The Warrior and the Empress) (Tom Tykwer, 2000). A man and a woman meet by, what may be, chance when he saves her life and she becomes obsessed with him. The film is full of coincidences, but not annoyingly so. The woman still has to fight to meet the guy again, and she has to fight for him to not shut her out. She works at a mental institution where he has to hide for a while, and together with the quirky-but-determined girl it gives the film a Cuckoo’s Nest-meets-Amélie feel. If not for anything else it’s worth watching for the magnificent introduction shot and for the sequence where the main guy meets himself. [8/10]
