Chinatown

"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.”

I've watched this two or three times before but not for ten years at least. Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), a neo-noir mystery thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, is one of my all-time favorites. Everything elbows its way towards the film's perturbing culmination, a blend of noirish bleakness, disillusionment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, desperation, guilt, and evil.

What the film essentially says to us is the rich and powerful always win in the end despite all good intentions, despite the hero. "Chinatown" isn't just where the film's final few staggering moments unfold; it's a metaphor for authority doing, as Jake puts it in his final words, "as little as possible" while the top brass do what they want to whomever they please, and while the average Jane and Joe, in this case the people of Chinatown but intended as anyone beneath the elite, don't get truth or justice, or even an inkling of what the string-pullers are pulling. Very few films have pulled off such a clever and daring fusion of cynicism and entertainment.

Notorious

The beauty of this film (besides Bergman) is its ending. The good guy does not stumble across a gun and shoot down the baddie. The bad guy isn't hauled off to prison to rot in a dank cell. Instead, the villain is left in the lurch, his fate left up to our imagination, though unquestionably inescapable and ruinous nonetheless.

Notorious (1946) is an Alfred Hitchcock film noir starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and set in Rio de Janeiro. American agent T.R. Devlin (Grant) convinces Alicia Huberman (Bergman), a playgirl and daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, to go undercover and dig up dirt on a group of postwar Nazis who've fled to Brazil. The two fall in love (that blend of film-noir desire and adoration that materializes in the seconds upon meeting), but then one of the Nazis (Alexander Sebastian) who Huberman is spying on asks her to marry him, and Devlin's boss green lights the union. Devlin becomes jealous, then feigns a total lack of interest, which the rather naive Huberman regards as sincere rejection. After the marriage, Devlin and Huberman discover that Sebastian and his associates are stockpiling uranium in wine bottles. Huberman's husband finds out she knows this, and his mother urges him to discreetly eliminate her. What will do the trick? They decide on a daily draught of poison in her tea and the pretense of natural illness.

If I were to rate all the films noir I've seen, this would probably be in the top 20. Bergman and Grant are a perfect team-up, with Hitchcock at the helm no less, plus the exotic setting and characterization of Nazis from a perspective right after the war. Out of five stars, I'd says it's ★★★★½.

Pusher Trilogy

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher films are brilliant, bleak tales of wheeler-dealers each having a run of bad luck in Copenhagen's sordid underworld. The trilogy, Pusher (1996), Pusher II (2004), and Pusher III (2005), focuses on three separate protagonists (shown in photo), with some lead and supporting characters appearing in more than one. The films take dirty realism to a new dirtier level, with extreme violence and very little humor, dark or otherwise, and the final installment ending with perhaps the most grisly scene I've ever watched. But Refn's trilogy is more than just scumbag thrillers and savage megalomaniacs in a game of survival of the severest; Frank, Tonny, and Milo are at critical points in their criminal careers, and due to circumstances beyond their control (all three cases involving a bungled drug deal), they're forced to either fight or flee to survive. What for the most part goes unsaid, but Refn captured visually, is each protagonist's hunger to climb out of the abyss and leave behind the senselessness of their world. But not quite yet—they must appear as if they're in control, of themselves and of others. They must contain their desperation. They can't let out they've had enough, lest the other sharks get a whiff of their fear and tear them apart. And so these cornered rats make for compelling narratives, blending the conflicts of man vs. man and man vs. self.

I doubt I'll watch the trilogy again. The violence, particularly in Pusher III, stays with you. The acting is way above par in all three. Kim Bodnia, Mads Mikkelsen, and Zlatko Burić are equally outstanding, though Burić stands out for the unswerving realism throughout his performance. I'd seen Refn's Drive (2011), with Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, but nothing else directed by him. I've now added Refn's Bleeder (1999) and Fear X (2003) to my list.