The Prowler [1951]

 The aspect that one realizes immediately about The Prowler is that three key people associated with it were irreparably affected by McCarthy’s notorious Witch-Hunts. Its screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, who’d already been blacklisted, and consequently wrote it using the name of his friend Hugo Butler, who himself got blacklisted soon after; Losey too had to flee the country in the same year, and found himself blacklisted and thereby unemployable upon his return a year later, forcing him into exile thereafter. This bleak and cynical B-noir – with its politically loaded motifs that touched upon class envy, abuse of power by those in uniform, sexual misconduct, and running references to ghost towns and Indian burial grounds – were imbued with darker connotations by the above context. When Susan (Evelyn Keyes), a married woman who stays alone for long stretches as her husband is often away for his work as radio host, calls the police upon sensing being pried upon by a peeping tom, a nastier bad news inadvertently starts unfolding for her in the form of disgruntled beat cop Webb (Van Heflin). His role, ironically, is to provide protection, but soon tries to force himself upon her, and then hatches a dirty ploy to entrap her. While the plot’s progression was considerably dependent on contrivances, one senses bitter and nihilist undercurrents in it, that’re embodied by Heflin’s creepy and sinister turn. The desolate ghost town of Calico that it culminated in – a former mining town that witnessed an economic nosedive – emphasised the underlying themes of human corruption, greed and fatalism. The titular prowler, incidentally, was a classic red herring, with its purpose restricted to putting this sordid tale in motion.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Film Noir

Language: English

Country: US

Eva [1962]

In Eva, Joseph Losey had one foot into the underpinnings of American genre movies from his past and the other in the vocabulary of European arthouse cinema which he was headed to. These parallel facets strikingly informed his decision to adapt James Hadley Chase’s novel Eve – a compulsive, racy and gleefully lurid tale – into an unabashedly European film, with the setting transplanted from LA to Venice, and the story’s bleak and seedy fatalism – which it mirrored – counterpointed with a style that was modernist, baroque and dazzling. The latter aspect thereby flamboyantly foreshadowed the expressionistic palette of The Servant which he made next year. The resulting film, which was cut by the producers without Losey’s permission, was as manic, delirious and exhilarating a work as Michel Legrand’s thrilling jazz score that flamboyantly accompanied nearly its entire length. At its core, of course, was Jeanne Moreau – at the pinnacle of her beauty, glamour and fame, and at her most irresistible and magnetic – as the titular Eva, a bewitching, coldly seductive and unapologetically promiscuous femme fatale who’s addicted in equal measures to money, gambling and Billie Holiday. Tyvian (Stanley Baker), an embittered Welsh author from working-class background, who’s suddenly become rich and famous with his bestselling first novel – albeit one harbouring a shameful secret – is attracted to her like a suicidal moth to a blazing fire. In the process, he alienates his loving fiancée (Virna Lisi), squanders his wealth, and irrevocably damages his shaky reputation. Venice, with its decadence and dilapidation, provided a poetic setting, and which – along with the self-destructive tale – was stunningly photographed in B/W by Gianni Di Venanzo through a mix of compelling single-takes and bold Dutch angle shots.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Noir

Language: English/Italian

Country: France

The Third Lover [1962]

 Chabrol’s renowned ‘Hélène Cycle’ of films – murky, morally complex and spellbinding investigations into bourgeois social structures and familial setups, made between 1968-72, and with Stéphane Audran starring in most of them as the icy and ambiguous Hélène – is considered to have started with the brilliant examination of fractured relationships in La Femme Infidele. The Third Lover – made 6 years before that – could however be considered as a compelling precursor. Shot in brooding B/W by Chabrol’s frequent collaborator Jean Rabier – which provided an aesthetic departure from the afore-mentioned cycle made in lusty colours – it zoomed in on a ménage à trois involving an eerily happy couple and a shifty stranger who gets himself inserted into their private space, and which eventually progresses into darker impulses and rips everything apart. Albin (Jacques Charrier, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Alain Delon’s devious personification in the riveting Plein Soleil) is a mediocre, frustrated and self-destructive French journalist who’s been sent to Germany by the newspaper he’s employed with. While stationed at a small village near Munich, he befriends Andreas (Walther Reyer), a wealthy and respected German novelist, and his beautiful French wife Hélène (Audran, in a role that she’d make her own during her extraordinary tryst as muse for Chabrol, who she’d get married to a couple of years later). As Albin starts getting invited to their luxurious villa quite frequently, he becomes increasingly besotted with their contented conjugal life in general and with Hélène in particular. Before long he’s mired with sexual jealousy and murderous obsessions, especially when he realizes she’s uninterested in responding to his infatuated overtures, and starts following her like a manic prowler intending to blackmail her into acquiescence.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Marital Thriller/Romantic Noir

Language: French

Country: France

Merci pour le Chocolat (Nightcap) [2000]

 Liszt’s rapturous classical composition ‘Funerailles’ attained edgy and sinister undertones in Chabrol’s Merci pour le Chocolat. Music, therefore, was simultaneously ravishing and unsettling, with extended passages devoted to it as a means for both organically progressing the narrative and marvellously shaping the mood, and thereby playing a sensuous role in defining the film’s tone and atmosphere. Isabelle Huppert, in her penultimate collaboration with Chabrol, made it even more enticing and delicious with a stunningly slippery performance laced with just the right mix of sweetness, sharpness, straight-faced sinfulness and impish layers of delightful perversity of a well-made Swiss chocolate. This being a quintessential French noir, it was draped in sunshine and laced with understated elegance; and, being a quintessential Chabrol, it savoured the slow unravelling of the fractured underbelly of an upper-class bourgeois family. The film begins with the rebound marriage between Mika (Huppert), the well-off owner of a chocolate company, and André (Jacques Dutronc), a virtuoso pianist. They were married 18 years back – André’s second wife, with whom he’s had a son, died under mysterious circumstances – and they live in Mika’s stately mansion in Lausanne. When Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), a talented young pianist who might be André’s daughter, makes an impulse visit to their place and forms a deep bond with him, Mika’s underlying sociopathic tendencies get ruffled, despite receiving Jeanne with outward effusiveness. Huppert’s striking turn as a treacherous person – the kind that she’s made her own over her illustrious career – was meticulously synchronized with the film’s musical crescendo and complemented the sardonic themes of control, obsession and dysfunction. The interplay between music and menace, incidentally, was re-invoked the following year by Huppert in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Drama/Psychological Thriller/Marital Drama/Post-Noir

Language: French

Country: France

The Bride Wore Black [1968]

 While Truffaut loved making crime films as an expression of his love for classic noirs – albeit permeated with poetic sensibility that was distinctively French – The Bride Wore Black was arguably his most Hitchcockian work, and therefore his most direct ode to the iconic filmmaker who he deeply admired. Adapted from the fatalist roman noir of the same name by Cornell Woolrich, it was also a homage to the then-dying crime writer whose books he loved. This pulpy tale of a bride who exacts murderous revenge on the five people responsible for making her a widow on the day of her marriage, in turn, served as a direct reference to the premise, structure and devices of Tarantino’s absurdly entertaining Kill Bill. Though it arguably finds place as second-tier Truffaut – as much on account of the silly backstory and gaping plot holes, as for the differences that he had while shooting with his celebrated DOP Raoul Coutard, with whom he’d worked on three films in the past, that potentially impacted his direction – it nevertheless exuded captivating flavours, not least on account of its magnetic leading lady Jeanne Moreau, in her second collaboration with him. She was arresting as an icy-cold femme fatale who seductress and eliminates her victims in manners that were simultaneously outrageous and deadpan – pushing a lascivious ladies’ man (Claude Rich) off the balcony; poisoning a lonely middle-aged bachelor (Michel Bouquet); leading a cocky politician (Daniel Boulanger) to suffocation; piercing a smitten painter with an arrow while luridly posing for her; and getting herself arrested to finish off a corrupt scoundrel. Coutard’s dazzling cinematography – with its sunny, colourful visuals – imbued the film with a cool, modernist and detached flavour.

Director: Francois Truffaut

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Post-Noir

Language: French

Country: France

La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) [1969]

 Nearly a decade after Alain Delon’s character – triggered by fragile insecurity, repressed envy and spurned ego – took Maurice Ronet’s character to his watery grave in the dazzling thriller Plein Soleil, he did it again for similar underlying reasons in La Piscine. Sultry, sensuous and gloriously sun-drenched on one hand, while menacing, ominous and disquieting on the other – accentuated by rippling undercurrents of sexual tension and fervid jealousy – Jacques Deray’s luscious, languid, hypnotic, slow-burn smash hit served as the perfect companion piece to the earlier film. It also witnessed the ravishing pairing of former lovers Delon and Romy Schneider; she was roped in upon Delon’s insistence after Jeanne Moreau had turned down the role. Failed writer, recovering alcoholic and ad-man Jean-Paul (Delon), and his entrancing girlfriend Marianne (Schneider) with whom he’s in a passionate fling, are enjoying a lazy, carefree and steamy summer vacation at a luxurious Saint-Tropez villa in Côte d'Azur – basking in the sun, swimming in the open-air pool under the resplendent sky, and with the Mediterranean Sea discernible in the background – when their idyllic isolation is shattered by the sudden arrival of Marianne’s former boyfriend Harry (Ronet), a successful and insouciant music producer who’s still enamoured by her, along with his coy teenage daughter Pénélope (Jane Birkin). Marianne’s free chemistry with Harry, who’s an old buddy of Jean-Paul’s, provokes intense anxiety and turmoil under the latter’s disconcertingly placid demeanour, which in turn propels him towards seducing the wide-eyed teenager. This superbly performed ménage à quatre inevitably leads the increasingly tense narrative – photographed in lush visuals, with the camera often gazing at the roguishly attractive bourgeois characters, and accompanied by Michel Legrand’s jazz score – to a sinister finale.

Director: Jacques Deray

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Marital Thriller/Neo-Noir

Language: French

Country: France

Eaux Profondes (Deep Water) [1981]

 Three decades before Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert, two giants of French cinema, played father and daughter in Haneke’s devastating masterwork Amour, they had their first onscreen collaboration – and the only one for many years – as a couple conjoined in a toxic marriage in Michel Deville’s saucy, pulpy and criminally under-watched Eaux Profondes. This striking rendition of Patricia Highsmith’s magnificent novel Deep Water mirrored the author’s deliciously warped portrayal of a noxious relationship and closet sociopathy, and consequently emerged as a terrific adaptation of Highsmith, nearly at par with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Clément’s Plein Soleil and Wenders’ The American Friend. Middle-aged Vic (Trintignant) is a soft-spoken, well-to-do man of private passions – be it his vocation as a perfumier or his oddball hobby of petting snails in his garage – and lives a sedate life at a provincial French town. His friends, however, are concerned for him due to his placid demeanour despite his striking young wife Mélanie (Huppert) – with whom he has a doting daughter – openly taking young men as lovers. What they don’t know is that, he probably loves being cuckolded by his promiscuous wife who, in turn, teases him with her scorching sensuality and adulteries; what she, however, doesn’t know is that, there’s a violent streak under his sociable persona that’s about to snap. The vivid visuals, jazzy score, lurid carnality and seething violence boldly evoked a touch of giallo and B-movies. Trintignant was stunning in an atypical role, while Huppert was tantalizing as a coquettish seductress in the same year as her similarly sultry turn in Tavernier’s blazing tour de force Coup de Torchon, which too – incidentally – was a powerhouse adaptation of American crime literature.

Director: Michel Deville

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Neo-Noir/Marital Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Monica, O My Darling [2022]

 Monica, O My Darling is a heady, devilish and deliriously entertaining joyride, and riotously lurid and pulpy at that. This crackling celebration of lowbrow crime genre was liberally peppered with references – Vasan Bala, who’s as much a cinephile as he’s a filmmaker, doffed his hats to pulpy hardboiled literature, neo-noir capers, cheesy B-movies, crime comics and old-school Bollywood – thus exuberantly underscoring its self-reflexive nature, even though that never came in the way of the enjoyment. Interestingly, amidst the stylistic flourishes, hyperbolic expressions of sensuality and violence, a labyrinthine plot packed with red herrings and outrageous twists, and darkly ironic interjections, Bala also craftily sprayed some pungent social observations into the mix – from ethics of AI and self-serving corporate governance to sharp class commentaries, nepotism and male gaze. Deliciously adapted from Keigo Higashino’s Burūtasu no Shinzō, the narrative hinges around a slew of gleefully saucy characters – the titular Monica (Huma Qureshi), an incredibly voluptuous and promiscuous femme fatale who has no qualms about her desires, wants and needs; Jayant (Rajkumar Rao), who’s made it big as much for his engineering chops as his relationship with his boss’ daughter, but which now hangs in balance thanks to Monica; the boss’ brash son Nishikant (Sikandar Kher) who hatches a preposterous plan to murder Monica, as she’s accused him – among others – of impregnating her; and ACP Naidu (Radhika Apte), a chatty and wisecracking cop. This rollicking tale of lust, greed, blackmail, double (and triple) crosses, and multiple grisly murders, was superbly complemented by a terrific retro soundtrack inspired by 1970s Hindi music – the film’s title is itself a gushing nod to an iconic R.D. Burman composition – created by Achint Thakkar and Varun Grover.

Director: Vasan Bala

Genre: Crime Thriller/Black Comedy/Neo-Noir/Mystery

Language: Hindi

Country: India

Decision to Leave [2022]

 Decision to Leave is one of Park Chan-wook’s most muted works – notwithstanding its arresting set-pieces, panache and controlled stylistic flamboyance – given its relative lack of operatic flourishes. But its theme of dark and self-destructive obsessions, along with its formal palette that was marked with extreme precision – with sprinkles of twisted playfulness thrown in – made this gradually unfolding neo-noir an intriguing new turn for the South Korean maestro. One might also credit that turn to The Little Drummer Girl, his compelling slow-burn adaptation to TV of John le Carré’s Cold War thriller. Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is an insomniac police detective in Busan in a tenuous marriage. His dull, workaholic and largely solitary existence experiences an electrifying jolt when he takes on the investigation of a retired immigration worker who’s found dead at the foot of a cliff that he loved climbing. His doubts about the cause of death – was it an accident or suicide or homicide – turn into an obsession when he meets Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the victim’s cold, enigmatic, enticing, impossibly alluring and significantly younger widow who’d illegally emigrated from China many years back, works at a centre for elderly care, and harbours tantalizing secrets. Though Hae-jun becomes convinced that Seo-rae has killed her husband, the brilliant but heavily repressed cop – reminiscent of Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct – finds himself inexorably drawn to this stunning woman against his best judgements. Despite some of its narrative contrivances and relatively weaker 2nd half, this moody Hitchcockian thriller – boasting of an absorbing turn by Wei, gorgeous production designs, seductive use of Jung Hoon-hee’s song ‘Mist’, and impish play on the slippery nature of languages – made this a gripping, addictive and oftentimes enthralling crime thriller.

Director: Park Chan-wook

Genre: Crime Thriller/Post-Noir/Romantic Noir/Police Procedural

Language: Korean

Country: South Korea

Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate) [1981]

 There’re two kinds of memorable cinematic adaptations of literary texts – those where the filmmaker imbues their vision and signature while retaining the book’s narrative details; and those where s/he radically supplants its location, context and period, and even laces it with politics specificities of its own, while retaining only its thematic essence and narrative barebones. Bertrand Tavernier’s caustic, unsettling and brilliant neo-noir Coup de Tronchon – like such other fabulous examples as Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Godard’s Band of Outsiders, Kurosawa’s Ran, Bharadwaj’s Shakespeare Trilogy (Maqbool, Omkara and Haider), etc. – emphatically belongs to the latter category. In this fascinating rendering of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel Pop. 1280, Tavernier transplanted the tale from the American Deep South of 1910s to Senegal under French colonialism in 1938 with WW2 lurking round the corner. As may therefore be guessed, he added lashing commentaries on the horrors of colonialism, along with racism, moral rot and human corruption, into this story of violence and sociopathy. Lucian (Philippe Noiret) is a seemingly good-natured but simpleton cop in a dusty shantytown who’s cruelly humiliated by two local pimps, lampooned by his boss, scorned by his peers, pitied by the locals, and cuckolded by his sensuous wife (Stéphane Audran) who’s even kept a lover at home. However, upon being gradually pushed to the precipice, he finally snaps with stunning brutality. In parallel he starts a racy affair with a saucy, nubile widow (Isabelle Huppert) who he’d been lusting after for long. The sun-washed visuals, terrific jazz score, compelling use of single-takes and grimy atmosphere marvellously interplayed with pitch-perfect performances, tar-black humour and scalding political overtones in this work filled with macabre energy, hilarious absurdity and manic unpredictability.

Director: Bertrand Tavernier

Genre: Black Comedy/Crime Comedy/Neo-Noir

Language: French

Country: France

Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) [1964]

 Godard made a euphoric return to the world of B-movies – the palette for his seminal debut feature Breathless – with Band of Outsiders, his 6^th film in 4 years. This quirky, funny, playful and irresistibly infectious work – filled with ingenious interludes and asides, and wry pastiche to American genre cinema – formed a lovely companion piece to Truffaut’s dazzling sophomore film Shoot the Piano Player, in that both were eccentric adaptations of pulpy hardboiled novels – Dolores Hitchens’ Fools’ Gold and David Goodis’ Down There, respectively –, and they effortlessly juxtaposed bleak and downbeat poetic realism with remarkable stylistic bravado and nonchalance. This slacker crime caper revolved around two guys – the sincere and straightforward Franz (Sami Frey), and his cynical and raffish buddy Arthur (Claude Brasseur) – vying for the same girl, viz. the vivacious, coquettish and doe-eyed Odile (Anna Karina), who they’re trying to have as a partner-in-crime in their plan to rob the large stash of cash which, as per her information, can be found in the building in a grimy Parisian suburb where she resides. Things, unsurprisingly, don’t go as planned, which was twice over here on account of its post-noir sensibilities and its maverick director. The latter aspect was especially noteworthy thanks to inspired sequences which’ve become part of cinematic folklore – Franz and Arthur’s faux recreation of Pat Garrett shooting Billy the Kid; the troika’s seductive and melancholic “Madison dance” in a nondescript café; their celebrated mad dash through the Louvre – and myriad other irreverent interjections, like the minute of silence, Karina breaking the fourth wall with the rhetorical question, “why a plot?”, etc. Michel Legrand’s terrific jazz score and Coutard’s melancholic B/W photography added to its roguish charm.

Note: My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Crime Thriller/Crime Comedy/Buddy Film/Avant-Garde

Language: French

Country: France

Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) [1960]

 Like someone once eloquently surmised Godard’s scintillating debut – which became the Nouvelle Vague’s manifesto and, alongside The 400 Blows, its most influential work – “there was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless.” Free-form, improvisational, impudent, iconoclastic, exhilarating, and a stunning volte-face to conventions, it heralded its defiant and non-conformist auteur’s transition from theory to action. It was based on a story by his former Cashiers du Cinema comrades Truffaut and Chabrol, which he radically reworked and wrote the script on the fly, even feeding lines to his actors from behind the camera; this was his first of many unforgettable collaborations with Raoul Coutard who made extraordinary cinematographic innovations during its making, and shot a number of remarkable single takes, including an astonishing double full camera rotations in a cramped interior space while following two people from the streets to inside, and the famous climactic tracking shot; the film’s initial cut clocked two hours, prompting Godard to slice between scenes, thus leading to its legendary jump-cuts… anecdotes about the film remain as spellbinding as the film itself. Godard took French cinema to the streets of Paris, and displayed his love for American B-movies – gangsters and noirs – in this jazzy romantic noir with a fine score by Martial Solal, involving Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), an insouciant car thief who loves emulating Bogart and is on the lam after killing a cop, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), an alluring and enigmatic girl-woman whose introduction – hawking New York Herald Tribune on Champs-Élysées – remains one of the most recognizable sequences in cinema. Melville, in a deadpan cameo, ironically quipped that his greatest ambition was “to be immortal, and then die” … well, Godard achieved exactly that.

Note: My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Crime Drama/Post-Noir/Romantic Noir

Language: French

Country: France

Alphaville [1965]

 Nearly every powerful and prescient dystopian work – both literary and cinematic – evoke past and present sociopolitical manifestations, even while ostensibly depicting the future. And Godard, the radical prankster that he always was, went a step further by situating Alphaville in then present-day Paris devoid of any futuristic SFX while portraying a totalitarian future where aspects not associated with cold logic – love, grief, memory, poetry – haven’t just been outlawed, they’ve also been expunged from the lexicons. And, while primarily a sci-fi, it was also a fascinating B-noir pastiche – unsurprising, considering the Nouvelle Vague auteurs’ love for classic American noirs – what with its hard-boiled gumshoe in trench-coat and fedora. It was, therefore, a work of dazzling formal swagger and panache where impish humour, pop-cultural references and genre subversion vied for space with deeper philosophic inquiries and antifascist commentary. Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine; he’d played this character in multiple European films) is a weary secret agent who’s made an inter-galactic journey to the titular technocratic dictatorship – in the garb of a reporter – in order to destroy a tyrannical supercomputer called Alpha 60 that controls every aspect of life and society here. During the course of this dangerous mission he develops a soft spot for the beautiful and enigmatic daughter (Anna Karina) of the state’s mastermind. The mesmerizing B/W photography imbued Paris with a dehumanizing atmosphere by focusing on its modernist side – Tati, too, would do that in his masterpiece Playtime – while the bravura single-take sequence that the movie begun with almost belied its otherwise improvisational nature. Ironically, Alpha 60’s guttural voice – which reminded me of Godard’s own throaty voice-over in The Image Book – was actually provided by a man with an elotrolarynx.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Sci-Fi/Post-Noir/Existential Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Long Day's Journey into Night [2018]

 New Age Chinese filmmaker and poet Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is a work as much drenched in bold expressionistic flavours and fatalist atmosphere, as it’s awash in moody poeticism. Consequently, with its meandering structure, obtuse narrative, wry monologues, dream-like palette and oblique cinematic references, it’s closer to a hypnotic tone poem – the kind that one “experiences” rather than “comprehends”. And, irrespective of whether one finds the director’s formal experimentation as avant-garde and brilliant or self-conscious arthouse showboasting – or a mix of both – there’s no doubting its visual splendour and technical virtuosity. The languorously paced storyline is about Lou (Huang Jue), a weary man with a shady past, who’s returned to his grungy hometown of Kaili after many years on the occasion of his father’s death, in order to search for Wan (Tang Wei), an enigmatic and irresistible femme fatale from his past who continues to hold deep sway on his mind. Thus he begins a journey that’s as much in the specific milieu of Kaili as it’s into his memories, fantasies and subconscious, thus making this romantic neo-noir a strangely intriguing watch. In the melancholic first half –ravishingly composed and hauntingly scored – he reminisces about an old friend who was murdered, visits his last surviving family ties to a small restaurant that his father used to run, and encounters people from Wan’s elusive past and present as he’s increasingly enmeshed in memories of her. And, in the inexplicable 2^nd half, it suddenly shifted gears by embarking on a bravura, astonishing one-hour long single take sequence, and the jaw-dropping audacity of this tracking shot (filmed in 3D) might well be the film’s raison d'être itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Neo-Noir/Romantic Noir

Language: Mandarin

Country: China