After I left the Film Forum in the late afternoon, I wandered around lower Manhattan for a while, through Soho and Astor Place, where I often used to walk during my lunch hours when I worked in the city. I had some time to kill before my next movie, and I wanted to give Wendy and Lucy time to emotionally gel in me, since it was such an excellent movie. It deserved its own breathing space before I saw another film.
Over the next few hours, I perused the one-dollar stacks outside the Strand Bookstore at 12th and Broadway, picking up a biography of Adlai E. Stevenson, a find that definitely plugs a gap in my personal library. Then I bought a falafel sandwhich from a vendor on Broadway and ate it standing up in front of Grace Church. The sidewalks were crammed with people, and the warm night air felt like buoyant spring, like the year was waking up.
A little after 7 p.m, I walked just a block or two over to the Cinema Village on 12th (map) and bought a ticket at the outdoor window for Tell No One, a French thriller that had been making the rounds of art houses last fall, but which I had missed while I was on my trip. I was thrilled when I saw that it was playing in Manhattan, and that I had a chance to see it.
The Cinema Village is definitely a Manhattan theater: it is about as compressed as you can get, and still have a multiplex theater. From the tiny lobby, you go either up or downstairs into one of the auditoriums, which are basically stacked on top of each other. There were about eight rows of seats, and a ramp between the seats and the screen was the roof of the auditorium below. The atmosphere had a throwback feel, like one was stepping back in the 1960s.
There were about ten other people in the audience, and I sat in the back row with my bag from the Strand. When the houselights came down, I settled in for what I figured would be a nice little murder-thriller, a perfect nightcap after an afternoon of emotionally weighty films.
At the beginning we see a dinner---a man (a medical doctor) and wife, along with his grown sister and other people, are sharing a meal outdoors. Later the man and his wife are swimming alone at a lake. They strip naked and make love. Then something terrible happens.
We skip ahead eight years. It turns out the woman was murdered, and the doctor was suspected by the police at first, but that is long since over, since the police determined that the woman was murdered by a serial killer.
Then things get all strange. A newspaper article seems to re-open something about the case. Then the man starts getting strange emails, ones directing to go to certain hyperlinks at a certain specified time, where he is shocked by what he sees. It turns out that his picture of what happened eight years ago was very wrong. The narrative is driven by his search to find out the truth about what happened to his wife. Along the way he will fall under renewed suspicion, and as part of the solving the mystery, he will have to play amateur detective in order to clear his name.
It sounds perfectly fine in concept, and for the first hour of the movie I was really riveted by the action, drawn deeper into the story. One of the things I really liked about the story was its use of technology to drive the tension and fear. Good thrillers often do this, exploiting our insecurities about new and innovative tech intrusions into our life in order to create tension. In a sense, these kind of horror and thriller movies are about the technology. The use or misuse of the technology becomes ultimately the emanation point of the horror and dread.
In this case, the technology was email, and specifically Yahoo! mail, as well as web cams. In principle, like I said, it was great.
But it just didn't work. After the first hour, the movie kept piling on more and more plot. By the climax, I had almost stopped caring about the charcters, because I had been forced to keep track of so much narrative. In order to learn what happens, the doctor (as well as the audience) must be subjected to a nearly ten-minute plot-dump explanation at the end, which still doesn't resolve everything nicely.
Another aspect of the movie I didn't like was that it turns out that the doctor and his wife were childhood sweethearts, something that becomes important in the story itself. In this kind of scenario, this should be the first, or nearly the first, thing we learn about them, so that it becomes a framing story of the entire movie. In this case, it was sort of "slipped in" along the way, and thus didn't have the correct emotional resolution at the end.
After the house lights came up, I overhead a younger guy with sideburns in the row in front of me, talking to two young women about the movie. He had thick glasses and a very intellectual look, with the build of Paul Simon but the facial look of Art Garfunkel. He was holding court about the deficiencies of the movie, especially in the opening scene. He was saying almost exactly the kind of things I had been thinking.
I jumped right in, "Yeah, you're absolutely right. The opening scene at the dinner table was completely wrong. Classically we should have seen the killer right there. The entire resolution to the mystery should have been prefigured there, in a way that made sense afterwards."
He completely concurred. I had found a kindred soul it seems. We shared opinions for a couple more minutes.
"Have you seen Taken," I asked them. They had. "Did you notice a lot of similarities between this movie and Besson's movie? High-level corruption, sexual abuse of minors, an abduction of a young woman, and even a chase scene on a motorway."
A look of understanding came into his eyes. "Of course," he said, "and Taken falls apart halfway through, just like this movie."
"Absolutely," I said. "They don't tell stories like they used to." Then thinking of the other two movies I had seen that day, I corrected myself, "Well, most of the time they don't."
That made him laugh. After that, I said goodbye and went out into the night by myself, leaving him talking to the two young women. The movie had sort of sucked, but those five minutes afterward had made it all worth while. Not only did I feel like I was in New York, but I felt like a New Yorker again.
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