In the sweepstakes of film noir bleakness this one just breaks the meter, I'll have you know right off the start. It's pitch black and can snuff the light out of your whole day.
It's also one of the most overwrought, which means that the several changes of story give us a kind of life that teeters on the edge of the believable and more on the side of cautionary fable. No one leaving the theater would be anything less than smacked in the face with the moral downfall of a man led astray by desire.
But set that aside and you'll see here some penetrating notation on the illusory nature of self.
It starts the way it usually does, perfectly upstanding family man chances to meet a woman one night. His previous life of being always punctually on time at the office and back home again for dinner with the family suddenly seems stifling in light of the excitement that being with her promises.
This desire for escape from humdrum routine is given to us visually in a drive with her to his cabin up to the mountains. A place of seclusion that is gathering dust because no one in the family wants to go there with him. He plays the piano for her, which he hadn't done in a long time.
So what does he do? He dies and disappears in a next life with her. How this is accomplished is one of those far-fetched changes of plot I was talking about that you'll just have to accept was the best solution that came to mind that night. But it's one of those masterful turns that film noir takes, suggestive of an illusory world and malleable self subject to capricious urge. I love everything about this shift, those anxious preparations to sail out of San Francisco, the notion that back home the wife had come to realize it had been tough on him.
So, in New York now everything ought to have been just the way he craved it. Away from routine that stifles the soul, alone with her, finally free to explore.
Except having disappeared the way he did, having shed the identity, he can no longer be the same person. He cannot take up his old practice again to make a living and even has to avoid anyone who might know him from that previous life.
This shift is one of the most startling depictions of desire, and can really jolt you if you watch with attention. It's not that we simply crave after things, that we get or not, and might be led astray in some vague moral sense or not. You'll see here how it hollows out the world, makes it concave. How, having traded away one life governed by more or less the same narrative but playing against a backdrop of implicit freedom, he finds himself in one where he's now prisoner of a meaningless freedom, no closer to the fulfillment he imagined.
Secluded in a hotel room, things grow unhinged, and there is more to glean here. It's not that he can't go out, he's perfectly free to. It's that, without the context of a larger life in which we come together, share talents, and see eaech other in the light of shared narrative, does it matter if he does? He's still (presumably) the same body, mind, personality, so what has been swept aside? Context.
The last part of the film is where it all unravels, therefore the most grotesque. There's growing anger and resentment between them. Our man is heavily made up now to look baleful and unkempt, a pathetic figure like out of a horror movie.
And then in another shift of story that you'll just have to buy, he finds himself back in that San Francisco life he left behind, only now he's recognized by no one and he's already dead in it. We have complete dissolution.
Pitch black but worth your while.
It's also one of the most overwrought, which means that the several changes of story give us a kind of life that teeters on the edge of the believable and more on the side of cautionary fable. No one leaving the theater would be anything less than smacked in the face with the moral downfall of a man led astray by desire.
But set that aside and you'll see here some penetrating notation on the illusory nature of self.
It starts the way it usually does, perfectly upstanding family man chances to meet a woman one night. His previous life of being always punctually on time at the office and back home again for dinner with the family suddenly seems stifling in light of the excitement that being with her promises.
This desire for escape from humdrum routine is given to us visually in a drive with her to his cabin up to the mountains. A place of seclusion that is gathering dust because no one in the family wants to go there with him. He plays the piano for her, which he hadn't done in a long time.
So what does he do? He dies and disappears in a next life with her. How this is accomplished is one of those far-fetched changes of plot I was talking about that you'll just have to accept was the best solution that came to mind that night. But it's one of those masterful turns that film noir takes, suggestive of an illusory world and malleable self subject to capricious urge. I love everything about this shift, those anxious preparations to sail out of San Francisco, the notion that back home the wife had come to realize it had been tough on him.
So, in New York now everything ought to have been just the way he craved it. Away from routine that stifles the soul, alone with her, finally free to explore.
Except having disappeared the way he did, having shed the identity, he can no longer be the same person. He cannot take up his old practice again to make a living and even has to avoid anyone who might know him from that previous life.
This shift is one of the most startling depictions of desire, and can really jolt you if you watch with attention. It's not that we simply crave after things, that we get or not, and might be led astray in some vague moral sense or not. You'll see here how it hollows out the world, makes it concave. How, having traded away one life governed by more or less the same narrative but playing against a backdrop of implicit freedom, he finds himself in one where he's now prisoner of a meaningless freedom, no closer to the fulfillment he imagined.
Secluded in a hotel room, things grow unhinged, and there is more to glean here. It's not that he can't go out, he's perfectly free to. It's that, without the context of a larger life in which we come together, share talents, and see eaech other in the light of shared narrative, does it matter if he does? He's still (presumably) the same body, mind, personality, so what has been swept aside? Context.
The last part of the film is where it all unravels, therefore the most grotesque. There's growing anger and resentment between them. Our man is heavily made up now to look baleful and unkempt, a pathetic figure like out of a horror movie.
And then in another shift of story that you'll just have to buy, he finds himself back in that San Francisco life he left behind, only now he's recognized by no one and he's already dead in it. We have complete dissolution.
Pitch black but worth your while.