I’ve been watching a lot of noir and neo-noir-y pictures lately, more out of accident than anything. First there was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a comic take on noir conventions starring Val Kilmer as a gay detective and Robert Downey Jr., in a stretch as a small-time crook turned prospective actor. Not the absolute highlight of either man’s career, but an enjoyable picture all the way through.
Then, I picked up Lucky Number Slevin for cheap down at the Hollywood DVD. It’s a movie you can’t help but like, no matter how much it cheats on you. A twisty neo-noir that makes a few questionable decisions, saved by a good-natured performance from Josh Hartnett and Lucy Liu in the perkiest role I’ve ever seen her in.
Shortly thereafter I got Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low in the mail. Kurosawa’s noir films aren’t as well-known as his other work, but few who have seen them fail to number them among his best. They include Drunken Angel, Toshiro Mifune’s first starring role, and Stray Dog, a tense police procedural that doubles as social commentary on post-war Japan and a great leap forward from anything he did before. High and Low is a complex police story that doubles as a morality play. It is complex and subtle, and I highly recommend it. I also recommend The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa’s transplantation of Hamlet to 1950s Japan, and by far the darkest of any of his noir-style films.
And now, tonight, The Departed sits on my coffee table. I think you already know my opinion of that movie.
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As long as I’m writing about movies, I feel compelled to mention Himalaya, the most beautiful movie I’ve seen in many years. It’s about the salt men of the Dolpa region of Nepal. These people live above the tree line, and lead a yearly yak caravan up the mountain to gather salt from a great salt lake, then venture down the mountain to the “grain land”, where they trade the salt for food and other goods with which to survive the winter. This movie is a fictionalization of one such journey, directed by a National Geographic photographer who’s lived in Nepal since 1983, and starring, by necessity and good fortune, Dolpa tribespeople playing characters very much like themselves. One character, an elder former chief, is played by an elder former chief.
That may help explain why performances they give are very rich and unaffected, although if you’ve ever tried to play yourself and make it look convincing on video, you’ll know that it is no mean feat. The woman who plays the mother of the young chief-to-be (the film was originally subtitled l’enfance d’un chef) is especially effective, with eyes that convey pages of dialogue in a glance. Even the yaks in this film exude personality.
The main attractions, however, are the incredible, often stark beauty of the landscape, shot like you’d expect a National Geographic photographer to shoot them, and the sheer disconnect between the world these people inhabit and the one we live in. Until a screw-cap bottle makes a brief appearance halfway through the movie, and in fact in its entirety otherwise, it could have been set any time in the last thousand years or so. I’m sure anything that would locate the story more in the present were intentionally removed from the film, but a survey of Flickr pictures tagged ‘Dolpa’ indicates it probably wasn’t a very hard job.
At one point, the child at the center of the film, who is heading down from the mountain village for the first time, asks his elder brother, a painter and monk, what he is drawing. “A tree”, he replies. The boy asks if he has ever seen one, and his brother, who has lived in the monastery since he was eight, replies, “no, but my master taught me how to draw it.”
That’s the kind of world they live in, and it is not the least of this movie’s accomplishments to afford us a rare, spectacular look into it.
Oh, and while I’m at it, Manohla Dargis can suck my nuts. That bitch wouldn’t know a good movie if it bit her in the ass.
