This one’s got all the hallmarks of a late 40s police procedural: location shooting (Boston and the Cape), a police detective deploying new scientific techniques, and some sordid sex-murder stuff. This one’s a little better than most because John Alton does some cool cinematographic work, John Stahl gets some melodrama out of his lead actress, and Ricardo Montalban (one of my odd but obsessive obsessions) is the lead. Nifty stuff.
Jia returns to his recurring obsessions, once again documenting the effects of China’s dramatic economic changes over the course of an entire generation. This one has more of a documentary feel than others: he concentrates on faces from a distance—faces that are never quite socioeconomic types, exactly, but mere faces, nonetheless. He portrays the nation from an analytical distance. Even Tao Zhao is more opaque than usual: she barely speaks; she moves through the whole thing like a ghost anxious…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
I finished watching the second half of this movie for the third class in a row this morning. My students at Tisch today were angry, ashen. What could I say to them? In the 8am class, I was in tears throughout a lot of the film. Every time Sarah Jane or her mother spoke I had to choke back a gasp. The funeral was more moving than anytime I’d ever experienced it. But in this screening, my usual ironic antagonism…
I had that all-too rare experience of appreciating a film I loved even more because of the experiencing of teaching it. The first time I saw the movie (at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens (then called the American Museum of the Moving Image) back in 95 or 96) was one of the very few moments I left a theater feeling as if my mind had split open (my first screenings of L'AVVENTURA and of Apichatpong come to…
