Last week at our weekly bad film night, for
some unexplainable reason we decided not to watch the direct-to-DVD horror film
starring Uri Geller entitled Sanatorium
aka Diagnosis (2001 / German trailer)
and, instead, pulled this totally unknown B&W feature-length animation film
out of our pile of mystery movies on DVD.
What can we say other than that it ruined
the night: instead of some hilariously crappy movie as expected, we found
ourselves watch a truly engrossing and first-rate if flawed and obviously low budget movie.
We would have been like totally pissed off had the movie not captured our attention so
thoroughly and been so entertaining (in a good way). It is without a doubt the
best B&W animated film noir we've seen since, well, about a half year ago
when we caught the animated French sci-fi noir, Renaissance (2006 / trailer).
That film is a good one in itself, but
Film Noir definitely out-noirs Renaissance,
sometimes to the point of almost becoming a satire of the genre. Unlike Renaissance, however, which is totally
B&W, Film Noir borrows a page
from the far more Baroque Sin City (2005 / trailer)
in that there are occasional flashes of color — women's red nails or lipstick,
red-rimmed gunshot wounds, yellow cabs, etc. — amidst the B&W shadows of a
world long gone wrong.
Like the much flashier, better-scripted and
bigger-budgeted star vehicle Sin City,
the obviously low budget Film Noir
is almost as much of an action flick as it is a noir. But Sin City is far more a comic nook than Film Noir, although Film
Noir does suffer from some comic book plotting and action sequences. But it
is a sign of quality that Film Noir works
so well despite such flaws. (One action scene in it does actually go over the
edge — though the film manages to recover — and brings to mind the joke
in Last Action Hero [1993 / trailer]
about how no matter how many guns are shot at Arnie in the film world, he never
gets hit by a single bullet: in Film
Noir, there is an outrageous car vs. helicopter chase in which our hero is
out-driving a machine-gun-wielding bad guy in a helicopter who shoots hundreds
of bullets at him at point-blank range but only hits the car's hood seven
times. An unintentional joke that leads to a small scene thereafter at a used
car lot that once again reinforces an idea that laces the entire movie:
everyone is corrupt, and everyone can be bought.)
Film
Noir utilizes the quintessential noir plot device
of amnesia, a favorite of traditional noirs —
Somewhere
in the Night
(1946 / trailer),
The Crooked Way
(1949 / scene),
High Wall (1947 /
trailer),
Black Angel (1946
/ trailer)
or Street of Chance (1942)*, anyone?
— as well as contemporary neo-noirs (Shutter Island
[2010 / trailer],
Memento [2000 /
trailer]
or Dark City
[1998 / trailer],
anyone?). Our hero awakens next to a dead body, a cop, and has no memory of who
he is or how he got where he is, and then spends more than half of the movie
trying to find out his identity. Confronted by duplicitous but hot-to-fuck
babes, a shady doctor, a missing private eye, and scores of hitmen out to kill
him, he begins to realize that whoever he is, he ain't a nice guy. And finally,
once he solves the mystery of his identity, he is no better off than before and
must now figure out a way of getting out of the whole mess alive.
* Street of Chance puts a twist on the
ol' amnesia plot by beginning with a man awakening from his amnesia, only to be
in danger from whatever it was that happened in his other life, which he in
turn now no longer remembers.
Film
Noir is set in a quasi-contemporary world complete
with mobile phones and an internet that supplies info better and quicker than
that of today, but at the same time the "back-projected" cityscape
often has an oddly 40s feel. Yes, the action takes place in the ultimate noir
city, Los Angeles,* a place that always rains at night unless you happen to be
driving a convertible (which, as everyone knows, you can also leave parked in a
bad part of town for days with its top down and keys in the glove compartment
and not have stolen). It's a lonely world, one in which the women might be hot
to hop in bed with you, but also won't bat an eye ratting on you once they've
had their big O. It is almost emblematic of that world that the only woman who
turns out to be "true", or "honest" and "trustworthy", is also the one who's
most fucked up. (That said, we personally have never met a junkie — and we've known more than we care to admit — who was any of the three.)
* We doubt that
anyone who has lived or lives in LA and who has enjoyed the experience of
driving its empty roads, particularly in the industrial areas, late at night
would disagree with this statement.
It is, in the end, a bit difficult to write
about Film Noir without giving away
too much of the events, and in turn it must be said that the movie is more a
case of matter over substance than anything else. Many aspects of the narrative
are pure baloney, of the level of low-grade pulp plotting, and the whole movie
probably wouldn't work if it had been done live action. But as an animated
movie, Film Noir bathes in its
source and creates a mood and rhythm that underscores the various themes —
duplicity being the main one, as almost every character of the movie has a hidden
side — that drift in and out of the movie. The animation itself is already a
bit old fashioned, but this is actually an advantage, as it acts a bit like the
mesmerizing patina that old age lends the B&W classic noirs. The jazzy
soundtrack, redolent of lascivious cigarette smoke and whiskey, might
definitely be more neo-noir than noir, but it underscores the visuals and
events excellently, adding that special spice to the pervading mood of the
movie.
The big question this film leaves in its
wake is: Why the fuck hasn't anyone heard of it yet? It should be a cult hit,
but it's more unknown than any given Ralph Bakshi flick. Time
for that to change.
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