Press Play Video Blog

We praise subtlety — actors with no need to chew the scenery. Would you guess one is Bruce Willis?

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

Last week’s slide show, The Overacting Hall of Fame, celebrated excess. This follow-up honors the art of understatement, citing 10 performers who’ve proven that less can be more.

I’d go into more detail here about the art of underacting, but that would be contrary to the spirit of the enterprise, now, wouldn’t it? Better to just get on with it.

I think you know good underacting when you see it, and I hope you’ll list your own nominees for the Underacting Hall of Fame in the Letters section.

You can view Matt’s slide show here at Salon.

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for Salon.com and the founder of Press Play.

By Josh Ralske
Press Play Special Contributor

What is it about Roman Polanski, confined spaces, and madness? As Steven Santos suggests in his video essay “Spaces”, Polanski’s unpleasant characters often find themselves trapped, not just by their physical surroundings, but by the growing certainty that their lives are unraveling around them. Physical violence plays a small, comically insubstantial role in Carnage. The real carnage, of course, is verbal and emotional.

It’s all about that psychological violence, about a growing sense of comic dread at having to spend time (in this case, a very brisk, lively 80 minutes) watching these unpleasant but not completely hateful characters tear each other (and themselves) to pieces.

“Comic dread” is not a phrase I’ve used often, and while there’s usually a darkly humorous element to Polanski’s work, the handful of his films that could be considered “comedies” are among his least successful. In fact, Carnage, with its almost farcical reversals and building chaos, is probably the only great comedy he’s ever made. (I should clarify that I’m not including the over-the-top wackiness of Bitter Moon or The Tenant in this category. I am including the kitschy, beloved The Fearless Vampire Killers.)

Unlike The Ghost Writer, which jammed Polanski’s perverse, alienated, sardonic aesthetic into a dryly glamorous, somewhat boilerplate international thriller, Carnage seems, in many ways, perfectly suited to the director’s oeuvre.

The film opened with a surprise, for me. I went in cold for a change; it had even slipped my mind that the film was based on Yasmina Reza‘s play, God of Carnage. So my reaction to the opening shot was, “Wait a minute. That’s New York City.” Even those unfamiliar with the original work will probably realize immediately that Polanski is not going to “open up” the play. Like his characters, Polanski couldn’t step out into the big world outside that elegant apartment, even if he wanted to.

One couple, investment broker Nancy (Kate Winslet) and corporate lawyer Alan Cowan (Christoph Waltz) visit another, hamster-murdering hardware wholesaler Michael (John C. Reilly) and writer Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster), to discuss a violent incident between their respective sons in Brooklyn Bridge Park (seen over the opening credits), in which the Cowan boy hit the Longstreet kid in the mouth with a stick. The parents get together, and at first it seems like the type of perfunctory meeting at which people behave politely and keep whatever they’re really thinking to themselves. But of course, one can’t let oneself be walked on, and one’s children are important, and little things are bound to slip out. Including vomit — so much vomit — from Nancy, all over Penelope’s rare art catalogues. So much for our pretensions at being civilized and highly cultured people.

I don’t think I’ve seen a film so focused on the minutiae of language and the minefields we traverse in everyday conversation since Pontypool, and that’s good company. These are terrific actors, of course, able to convey a wide range of emotions with tremendous subtlety. It’s indicative of the quality of the performances here that Foster sometimes seems a little outclassed. Waltz gets big laughs just through the way Alan relates to the furniture in the Longstreet apartment, casually resting his leg against a cabinet while taking a call, or moving his plate around and munching Penelope’s controversial cobbler as he chats away about the potentially damaging story involving a pharmaceutical client that just broke in the Wall Street Journal. The phone rings and he’s no longer really in the room. His relation to his Blackberry is nothing particularly original, but it’s conveyed with such precision, such specificity, that it’s hysterically funny. There are several moments when it seems like the Cowans are on their way out the door, but of course they’re staying for the length of this real-time scenario. The funniest of these near-escapes is when Alan (who seems to want out more than anyone) backs out of the elevator, into Nancy, who’s following him on, because he is losing reception.

Eventually, inevitably, the couples give up their frail façade of solidarity and turn on each other. There’s a predictability to the way the conflicts break down along gender lines, but one of the pleasures of Carnage is that, within its relatively simple framework, there’s an attention to detail that makes it all feel fresh and surprising. It has that in common with the debased urbanity of earlier works like The Tenant, Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, where the audience is aware going in that we will witness a disintegration, a breakdown of social interaction, a decline into madness, but wherein the pleasure lies in the ironies produced by that foreknowledge, and in the wit of the filmmakers’ details.

Of course, Polanski works well with actors (he got Adrien Brody an Oscar! True story!), and shoots their environs with great precision. Aside from those bookends in the park, it all takes place in the Longstreets’ lovingly-appointed Brooklyn apartment. Everything is in its place, the director knows where to put the camera. He’s shot this type of chamber piece before. The set is designed to the hilt, and every shot conveys useful information about who these people are and how they live. And while these two couples are trapped, almost like Buñuel’s famous dinner party guests, the audience never feels that way.

And, well, there’s the rub. This is a terrific film. (Despite that hamster at the end. That hamster belongs in the same film with the rat at the end of The Departed, and they should talk and have adventures, and maybe it should be in 3D, but they should never serve as metaphors for anything or pretend they have anything profound to say about anything.) But shouldn’t we be a bit more uncomfortable? The actors lend these characters humanity and complexity, but (and this is particularly true of Penelope, whose very name provokes mocking titters, and perhaps that’s why I didn’t feel Foster quite held her own in this ensemble) the film is clearly holding them in judgment, and there’s a coldness — a distancing, despite the close quarters — that allows us to sit in judgment as well. This isn’t Neil LaBute territory — it’s a lot funnier, for one thing — but it verges on that type of glibness and superficial cynicism. It doesn’t have the thematic depth of, say, Six Degrees of Separation, which skewers a similar stratum of well-heeled New Yorkers, but addresses issues of race and class in a way that takes it beyond the parameters of “rich white people and their problems.” Carnage addresses the world at large, in passing, and it’s clear that part of its point is that to these people, that outside world is only of interest to the extent that it reflects on how they see themselves. In the press notes, the actors discuss how the film addresses parenting, but Carnage is — pointedly — not at all about parenting. The children, like Africa, exist only as a reflection of their parents’ fragile egos.

Any film that makes me laugh as much as this film did, that’s this smart and precise and vibrantly acted, and that sends me from the theater with something to talk about, well, that film gets a strong recommendation, however short it may fall of its aspirations to profundity and greatness.

By Aaron Aradillas
Press Play Contributor

In 1994, Roman Polanski got up off the mat after nearly a decade and a half of uninspired activity. The 1980s saw the troubled filmmaker direct two movies: 1986’s Pirates remains his absolute worst effort (like a lot of big-budget enterprises from the ’80s, it felt like a movie made by committee), while 1988’s jet-lag thriller Frantic starts off great but quickly loses focus. (That might’ve been deliberate.) Then in 1994, both Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden saw Polanski display his trademark command of tone while tackling tricky topics like sexual obsession, revenge and love. It is impossible to view any film directed by Polanski without his sexual assault case casting a shadow over it. (He would plead guilty to having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.) Fleeing the country to avoid possibly being railroaded by a publicity-seeking judge, Polanski forever damned his reputation as one of the best directors of his generation. His movies, both those made before and after his scandal, would be viewed through the prism of being made by a man on the run. Starting with Tess and leading up his latest film Carnage, we would scrutinize each film for telltale sings of an admission of guilt — or, more to the point, self-justification. It would seem Polanski at first did his best to avoid making movies that would leave room for this kind scrutiny. But Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden show Polanski both mocking his detractors and confronting them with uneasy questions about what exactly would satisfy their notion of justice. Taken together, the movies show Polanski getting a handle on how feminist rage can be turned into empowerment. It’s as if he has intimate knowledge of how, in some instances, victimization can lead to taking control of one’s life.

Bitter Moon (made in 1992 but not widely seen until 1994) is a strangely romantic sex comedy about the sanctity of marriage. That may seem odd coming from someone as kinky as Polanski, but the movie seems to toy with the audience’s preconceived notions of what they think they know about the filmmaker. Set aboard a cruise ship headed for India during the New Year holiday season, the story is a love-hate quadrangle. Nigel and Fiona (Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas) are supposedly a happily married couple celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary. They are slowly entranced by Oscar and Mimi (Peter Coyote, Emmanuelle Seigner), another married couple who seem to get a perverse joy out of displaying their contempt for one another. Oscar, now confined to a wheelchair, is a failed writer living in Paris with the sexually adventurous Mimi acting as his caretaker in a weird variation on a master-slave relationship. We slowly come to realize that that is far from the case.

Polanski’s playfulness is evident from the opening credit sequence, which has us looking through a circular port window in the ship. The sly wit of the image is that it can easily be interpreted as looking through a telescope, the telltale image of voyeurism. The sickest joke in the movie is Coyote’s performance. He gives Oscar just the right touch of bemusement at his own predicament, which lets the viewer off the hook from ever feeling sorry for him. (We actually come to despise him.) The upshot to the performance is that Coyote is playing up the audience’s idea of what they think they know about Roman Polanski. Oscar is not Polanski, but a satiric version of what we think it means to be an artist living in exile in Paris. (In reality, Polanski would love to return to Hollywood. It still remains the best place to find steady work.) This joke is compounded by the casting of Polanski’s real wife as Mimi. We can clearly see what could drive a man like Oscar to become obsessed with her. In extended flashbacks, as Oscar tells his story to Nigel, we see how Oscar and Mimi’s relationship began as an only-in-the-movies tale of mutual attraction. Their attraction quickly turned to blissful obsession that then turned to alienation and cruelty. Sex can seem funny when it doesn’t involve you. Polanski knows this. The sex games they act out showcase that trademark Polanski kink, especially when Oscar puts on a pig’s mask.

In the past Polanski would’ve stopped at the kinkiness, but here he’s getting at something deeper. Bitter Moon suggests that a relationship based on erotic obsession verging on mania is destined to be doomed. Mutual attraction between partners is necessary in any healthy relationship, but it is far from the most important component for a lasting one. From the outside, Oscar and Mimi’s enthusiastic courtship looks gloriously romantic. But with sex being the only thing defining them, it is inevitable one of them will get bored. It turns out Mimi’s love for Oscar is genuine. Playing the role of a struggling artist to the fullest, Oscar is revealed to be a shallow man unworthy of love. The scene where we find out exactly how Oscar came to be confined to a wheelchair has a Looney Tunes-style logic to it. Oscar’s physical punishment is just the beginning of his comeuppance.

Polanski indulges in pop sensuality in ways both ironic and surprising. An early scene has Nigel sitting at the ship’s bar, spotting Mimi as Peggy Lee’s “Fever” plays on the soundtrack. (Like Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, Grant is very good at using his clean-cut exterior to mask his naughty-boy tendencies.) A playful sex montage from early in Oscar and Mimi’s relationship is set to George Michael’s “Faith.” Later, when Oscar is free of Mimi and on the prowl, Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” accompanies him. The climax is set during a storm as the new year approaches. New Year’s is meant to be a time for fresh starts and resolutions. For Nigel and Fiona that means possibly throwing their marriage away as Fiona, hip to Nigel’s growing obsession with Mimi, dances with the devil. The scene is scored to a cover of “Slave to Love,” an ironic nod to 9 1/2 Weeks. Here are both scenes.

The ending of the film may seem like the logical conclusion to Oscar and Mimi’s S&M romance, but look closer and you’ll see it is an act of salvation. Mimi’s obsession with Oscar, and then with getting revenge for Oscar rejecting her, is her undoing. Fiona briefly flirts with obsession but quickly learns how harmful it can be. Made five years before Eyes Wide Shut, Bitter Moon says that a healthy marriage is one where not every whim and fantasy is indulged, and that what Nigel and Fiona need to do is…

Death and the Maiden is a far more complex and disturbing film. It’s a love-hate triangle that powerfully dramatizes the cruel mind games men and women play on one another. Based on Ariel Dorfman’s play, Death and the Maiden takes on the guise of a political statement about the fallout from the toppling of a fascist dictatorship. (The play is set in an unnamed South American country that is clearly meant to be Chile.) In truth, the film is a howl of feminist rage against male dominance and entitlement. And the rage is more than justified; it’s long overdue.

The bulk of the film takes place in a seaside house that feels purposely cut off from the rest of the world. In this house live Paulina and Gerardo Escobar (Sigourney Weaver, Stuart Wilson). When we first see Paulina, she is preparing dinner. The precision of her movements suggest a masculine forcefulness. (Weaver’s wife-beater-ish sleeveless top allows her to show off her magnificently muscular yet feminine arms.) When a nasty storm knocks out the power, she takes her dinner into the closet. This act tips us off to her constantly being on guard.

It is revealed that Paulina had been held captive and tortured for two months during the fascist regime. She is now married and doing her best not to live in the past. Her husband Gerardo is a high-ranking liberal lawyer who has just been appointed by the newly elected president to head the committee responsible for bringing to justice those who killed countless rebels who had a hand in bringing democracy to the country. Paulina is mistrustful of these new male-dominated “transition” committees. (They only plan on prosecuting those who committed murder, not torture.) When her husband returns late after getting a flat in the rain, she is startled by the sound of the voice of the man who gave him a ride. She is convinced the man is the same one who tortured her. She was blindfolded throughout her ordeal, but she claims she knows his voice. Given this incredible once-in-a-lifetime situation, Paulina ties him to a chair and puts him on “trial” for his crimes.

The play of Death and the Maiden is a contraption, a simplistic treatment of the hot-button topic of victims’ rights. It’s Deathtrap for bleeding-heart liberals. But Polanski is not really interested in whether Paulina is justified in seeking revenge. (In his view she is in the right.) Polanski obviously takes a perverse pleasure in telling a story where a woman gets the opportunity to confront the man who assaulted her. But that’s just the hook. It’s not the story. Having not seen the stage version, the question of guilt or innocence was supposedly left up to the audience. Polanski has little patience for such glib ambiguity. He believes there is no ambiguity when it comes to right and wrong. The ambiguity lies in a character’s motivations for doing good or evil. (Remember, it was Polanski, not screenwriter Robert Towne, who insisted that Evelyn Mulwray die and Noah Cross get away at the end of Chinatown. A Holocaust survivor, Polanski is fully aware that evil sometimes goes unpunished in the here and now.)

When Paulina hears the soothing voice of Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), we know she is absolutely right that he is the man who tortured her. It turns out she doesn’t want revenge or even justice, but to reclaim her femininity by reliving the whole ordeal. The “trial” allows her to relive the most traumatic relationship of her life, as Death and the Maiden becomes nothing short of a showdown between the sexes. She even appoints her “civilized” lawyer husband to be Dr. Miranda’s defense attorney. Why? Because she knows men will always protect one of their own. (In an early scene we see both Gerardo and Dr. Miranda get drunk and indulge in some jocular women-are-irrational-creatures banter that feels like lite Neil LaBute. Gerardo may be an upstanding liberal, but he is still a heterosexual male.)

Polanski stages the many verbal confrontations with such economical precision that, even though we are aware of the movie’s stage origins, it never feels stagy. He uses the claustrophobic nature of a one-room drama to his advantage. He breaks up the action just enough — an argument set outside the house, a trip to the bathroom — that, by the end, we are completely oriented to the layout of the Escobar home. Polanski’s direction rivals his work in the home-invasion scenes of Cul-de-sac or the domestic scenes set in the apartment in Rosemary’s Baby. (The mind boggles at the idea of a director of Polanski’s caliber making a movie in 3D.)

Throughout the movie there are little (and not so little) touches of sexual domination like, say, when Paulina takes off her panties and uses them as a gag. Or when she assists Miranda in the bathroom. Gerardo remains ineffectual. At several key moments when he is given an opportunity to take control of the situation, he freezes. In a way he is only acting to how Paulina has programmed him. Paulina loves her husband but they are not really intimate. When they have sex she seems to purposely check out. She has experienced enough aggression. Or has she? The scene where Paulina tells Gerardo exactly what they did to her while she was held captive plays off our queasy voyeuristic desire to know, too. The key to the scene’s power is how easily it plays like a lover’s confession of past indiscretions. Gerardo claims to be shocked because he didn’t know. He demands to know why Paulina never told him what they did to her. She accuses him of always knowing. After all, he is a crusading lawyer now in charge of bringing war criminals to justice. Then, she says, “There’s a difference between knowing the facts and hearing them from your wife.”

Finally, with Paulina threatening to execute her prisoner at dawn, Dr. Miranda breaks down and confesses his crimes. Kingsley, in a subversive bit of stunt casting, uses his saintly image to shocking effect. (Remember, Death and the Maiden was released a year after he played the pure-hearted Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List.) In a chillingly tender monologue, Miranda admits to falling in love with the power and control he had over Paulina, over everyone left in his care. What gives his words their shivery power is that he is not really offering a confession or justification. He is declaring a twisted form of love. For once in Paulina’s life a man is being honest with her. And she is grateful.

The coda of the movie is a Polanski-style zinger. The movie is bookended by a performance of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” We see Gerardo and Paulina in the audience. It isn’t until the end that we are shown the big picture. While holding her captive, Dr. Miranda would play Paulina’s favorite piece of music as comfort. It was really just a cruel precursor before he climbed on top of her. Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” became that telltale reminder of an ugly relationship, like when you can’t hear a particular artist or song following a breakup. The final scene shows Paulina now being able to listen to Schubert. The kicker is when she gazes up at a couple sitting in the balcony, and it is revealed to be Dr. Miranda and his wife taking in the same performance. Gerardo remains unaware, but Paulina and Dr. Miranda exchange awkward glances. The scene plays like the real-life occurrence of running into an ex while out on a date. For Polanski, at least Paulina can now enjoy a beautiful piece of music. It’s the little things that keep a marriage going.

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Play is devoting much of its content this week to a study of the films of Roman Polanski, whose new movie Carnage opens the New York Film Festival this Friday, September 30. We are counting down to the event by running a new video essay every day this week under the title Life’s Work: The Films of Roman Polanski. Chapter 4 of the series is a video essay by contributor Jim Emerson called Chinatown: Frames and Lenses. You can view Chapter 1 of this series, Polanski’s God, here. You can view Chapter 2 of this series, Spaces, here. You can view Chapter 3 of the series, Uniting The Fragments: Cul-de-Sac, here.]

By Jim Emerson
Press Play Contributor

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is a Panavision color film noir — a ghost story, really — about flawed vision and the inescapable resurgence of the past, made in 1974 and set in 1937. Private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) thinks he knows what’s going on, but as Noah Cross (John Huston) tells him, “Believe me, you don’t.” We see what Jake sees, and it’s invariably filtered or blocked — viewed from a distance through binoculars, or from outside through a door or window that obscures a more complete perspective. Photographs — snippets of time recorded on film, one of the tools of the detective trade — are potentially misleading because they don’t — can’t — capture what’s going on outside of the frame, beyond the moment.

This video montage is a hymn of praise to a film that had a profound effect on me when I first saw it as a 16-year-old in 1974, and that I’ve lived with, haunted, ever since. It’s also an unabashed love poem to the desperate, damaged and determined Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway).

Like close-up,” which I did in 2007, it’s a free-associative critical essay/dream sequence, based on themes and images (and sound and music) from the movie. Although, like a lot of creative pursuits, the process of assembling it (from pieces of film that were already floating around in my head) was largely unconscious, I now (at least in retrospect) think I understand why each fragment is where it is.

So, I thought I’d turn around and look back at Chinatown through the lens (or frame or door or window, if you will) of my video essay, using it as a way of translating the film’s images into critical prose. Because, in Chinatown, every image is loaded with meanings, associations, resonances. If you’re familiar with the film, you’ll immediately see that this reflection on Chinatown isn’t structured chronologically. Scenes, themes, moments and images keep circling back in fragments… not unlike they do in the film, but in a more condensed and less linear form…
[Anything you read from this point on may be held against you if you haven’t already seen Chinatown. And if you haven’t already seen Chinatown you have no business seeing any other movie until you do.]

It begins with the eyeglasses, one lens cracked, half the vision splintered. It is the solution to the mystery of all the relationships in the film, but not the solution Jake thinks it is when he retrieves this pair from a watery grave and shows them to Mrs. Mulwray. You see, her late husband Hollis didn’t wear bifocals…
A photo comes up out of the water (or developing solution). The wire-framed glasses in the first shot belong to one of the two men in the second.

Dissolve to another 8 x 10 glossy surveillance photograph taken by Gittes or one of his associates: a man and a woman rutting in the bushes. It’s the first shot of Chinatown, an image of adultery — Mr. Gittes’ métier. Again, a hand flips from one image to the next, creating a manual, frame-by-frame movie. (Hence the sound of the movie projector.)

Dissolve to more black-and-white 8 x 10s, more flipping from one picture to the next. These are the images Gittes himself took at Echo Park, of “the girl” with whom Mr. Mulwray, Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, was supposedly having an affair. We are at the apartment of Ida Sessions (Diane Lane), the woman who, at the beginning of the picture, poses as Mrs. Mulwray and hires Jake to investigate her husband’s infidelity. By now, Ida Sessions is known to have been an impostor. And she lies dead on the kitchen floor, in a pool of melted ice cream, among her scattered groceries.

Back to Echo Park and Gittes taking these previous photos from a rented rowboat. As Gittes points his camera… reverse angle to him lowering another set of lenses, binoculars, at a scene near a damp riverbed (“water again…”) during a Southern California drought. Dissolve to a close up of Gittes, again with a camera, spying from a rooftop. Mr. Mulwray and “the girl” are reflected in the lens. They kiss.

Cut to headline in the Los Angeles Post-Record: “Department of Water and Power Blows Fuse.” Underneath it is Gittes’ photograph of the furtive couple, cropped in the shape of a heart. Gittes believes he’s solved the case of Mr. Mulwray’s adultery. He hasn’t. A photo can freeze-frame a scene, but it doesn’t reveal its meaning.

Another frame within a frame: In a circular rear-view mirror we see a man get out of a car. It’s Mr. Mulwray, near some cliffs above the sea. The mirror belongs to Gittes, who has been tailing him.

Gittes approaches the lit, ground-floor windows of a house at night, partly screened by loosely woven blinds. He sees Mrs. Mulwray and her butler Kahn (James Howe) with a newspaper. At one point, Mrs. Mulwray’s face is seen through a ring from the curtain drawstrings. Another fragmented image, another frame, like through a gun sight. Gittes can’t hear what they’re saying, but when Mrs. Mulwray goes into another room, “the girl” is there on a bed, obviously distressed. Again, Gittes thinks he apprehends what he sees: Mrs. Mulwray has kidnapped her husband’s “girlfriend” and is drugging her, holding her hostage against her will. (At this point in the video essay soundtrack, there are two or maybe three pieces of Jerry Goldsmith’s music intermixed on separate tracks.)

A hand turns the knob of a shattered glass door and it slowly swings open. This is Gittes, arriving at Ida Sessions’ place. Dissolve to another door swinging open, with Gittes looking through the opening. It’s Ida, as “Mrs. Mulwray,” striking a wronged woman/femme fatale pose by the window, as she first appears to him at her office.

Gittes opens another door. There’s no one visible through the doorframe, but then Lt. Lou Escobar (Perry Lopez) and his deputy, Loach (Richard Bakalyan) appear from either side. This is the house where Gittes discovered Mrs. Mulwray and the girl. Escobar and Loach enter through the screen door and are reflected in the glass of the front door. More frames, filters, mirror-images… the patterns are dizzying and disorienting. That’s “Chinatown.” As Gittes says of the place (the part of the city, the state of mind the movie creates): “You can’t always tell what’s going on…”
Gittes enters smiling through another door. He can’t or won’t read the gestures of his associates who are trying to tell him something’s up. This is the famous scene where he sends his secretary Sophie (Nandu Hinds) to “the little girl’s room” to tell the off-color “Chinaman” joke he’s heard from his barber Barney. We don’t hear the joke in the essay (no dialog so far), but the music becomes louder and more discordant as the door opens behind Jake and we see… the real Mrs. Mulwray, whom he’s never met, standing in the frame. He turns and realizes she’s there, then turns back to Walsh (Joe Mantell) and Duffy (Bruce Glover) in shock and consternation.

Chinatown. The place in his past that haunts Gittes, the place where he tried to keep someone from getting hurt and wound up making sure that she was, keeps circling back and sneaking up on him, slipping out of the past and into the present. Jake charges ahead with his investigation, the camera often trailing right behind him, peering over his shoulder. But, as in this scene and so many others, for every door that opens (or shuts) before of him, another one appears behind him, introducing something or someone he did not see coming.

As if exiting, frame left, Gittes opens another yet door — but this one says: Water and Power. Chief Engineer: Hollis I. Mulwray. (Yes, “I.”) On the late Mr. Mulwray’s desk is a framed portrait of Evelyn Mulwray with a horse (“I went riding… bareback…”). As Jake investigates, flashes of light, like glints of sunlight on water, appear through the frosted glass of the office door behind him. Through the door enters Russ Yellburton (John Hillerman), Deputy Chief of the Department. (Jake visits these offices on two separate occasions, but they are mixed together here.) In a long tracking shot, Yellburton escorts Gittes out of Mr. Mulwray’s office, through the reception area (and past the stern secretary) into Yellburton’s office.

More framed photographs on the wall of the reception room, including one of Mrs. Mulwray’s father and husband together in 1932. Jake opens the door to the office to find workers removing the late Hollis Mulwray’s name. Another door opens behind Gittes, and it is Yellburton’s secretary, allowing him admittance to Yellburton’s office. All these doors, opening and closing, hiding secrets and promising revelations, begin to feel like elements in a labyrinth. No matter where Gittes goes, he winds up revisiting the same places…
And now Mrs. Mulwray with Lt. Escobar — and behind her, in another doorway, is Gittes, with Loach behind him. Mrs. Mulwray is surprised to see him, but he takes control of the situation. It is the beginning of a small conspiracy, an understanding between them.

Gittes stands before the big, thick, black, forbidding door of Mrs. Mulwray’s house. Kahn takes his card and then shuts it in Jake’s face. I’ve always thought that if you took out all the footage of Jake waiting for admittance, or otherwise loitering in doorways, “Chinatown” would be about an hour shorter. Twice, he waits at this doorway. The second time he pushes his way in, past the maid, who is draping the furniture (ghost-like), passing through the house and out through the arched portal into the back yard….

Reverse angle, night, from the back looking through the house and out the open front door. A puff of smoke from frame left reveals Gittes’ presence out-of-frame. A car pulls up out front. Noah Cross, with his walking stick, enters the house and comes toward the camera out onto the back patio.
A framed photograph of Cross in 1929, also with the walking stick. Dissolve to Cross and “Mr. Gitts.” Cross puts on his spectacles to examine what his chef has just served for lunch: A fish, one dead eye staring up from the plate. (“I hope you don’t mind. I believe they should be served with the head…”) Dissolve to another fish, this one on a flag sewn into a quilt, with the letters A C — Albacore Club. Another clue.

Dissolve to something shiny in a tidepool (“That’s where life begins…”). A starfish rests on a submerged rock. Gittes is squinting, trying to make it out. We’re in Mrs. Mulwray’s back yard. She enters through a gate behind him, and Jake casually drops the implement he was using to poke around in her pond.

The reservoir: A man with a knife (played by Roman Polanski) slits open one of Jake’s nostrils. An orange grove: Jake with a bandaged nose, wearing broken sunglasses with one lens punched out — yet another image of flawed/partial vision. Dissolve to two pocket watches (like the lenses of glasses), one of them smashed. It’s the method Gittes has used to find out how long Mr. Mulwray stayed at the ocean: one watch placed on either side of his tire tread. They tell him the time, but not what Mulwray was doing there. Water on the brain?

And, again, the glasses with the cracked lens. The images are all flowing together.
Mrs. Mulwray’s bathroom. She is cleansing the cut on his nose. The only dialog in this montage:
Evelyn: What’s wrong?
Jake: Your eye.
Evelyn: Wh-what about it?
Jake: There’s something black in the green part of your eye.
Evelyn: Oh, that. It’s a ff-flaw… in the iris.
Jake: Flaw?
Evelyn: It’s a sort of birthmark.
They kiss.

The flaw in the eye, a birthmark. That is the story of Mrs. Mulwray’s fate. And it’s Jake’s, too. She was born with hers. He still can’t see his own.

In bed, Jake lies on his back. To his left, Evelyn faces him in profile, one eye visible to the camera. Music cue: Fred Astaire singing “The Way You Look Tonight” by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. The song, in a piano transcription, is used in the actual film — along with others circa 1937, including a solo piano version of “Easy Living” and Bunny Berigan’s famous recording of “I Can’t Get Started.” “The Way You Look Tonight” was introduced by Fred Astaire in Swing Time (1936) and won the Academy Award for Best Song.

In this bedroom scene, the calmest in the film until it is interrupted by a phone call, Evelyn flirtatiously prods Jake about his past in Chinatown (“Cherchez la femme… ?”). Dissolve to Mrs. Mulwray driving her white convertible at night after rescuing Jake at the Mar Vista Rest Home. The windshield pane on the left has been cracked by gunfire. Jake looks over at her as she gently brushes something out of her eye. If you know where the movie is going, it’s a lovely moment… that gives you chills.
When Evelyn is called away from bed (suddenly self-conscious about her nakedness — not shown here), Jake follows her, smashing out a tail light in her car (yet another broken lens) to make it easier to track in the dark. The trail leads… to the house where Katherine (Belinda Palmer) is being kept.
Mrs. Mulwray is shocked to see Jake, who is repulsed by what he (thinks he) has seen. She looks at him, ravaged, her face half-lit with one tearful eye in darkness, and one tender cheek in the light, looking swollen and bruised.

Lyrics:
Oh but you’re lovely
With your smile so warm
And your cheek so soft
There is nothing for me but to love you
just the way you look tonight…

And we return to the broken glasses, wrapped in a handkerchief. Escobar opens the door of Mrs. Mulwray’s white convertible in Chinatown. The windshield is still cracked. Mrs. Mulwray, her body limp, falls halfway out of the car, her left eye blown out by a bullet. Jake stares, and raises his gaze to Katherine, who is screaming. Noah Cross looks at “the girl” and pulls her back to him, putting his hand over her eyes. She’s his, too — his daughter, and granddaughter — but Evelyn never wanted her to know that. Somehow in this extraordinary shot, the camera moves in front of Jake (as Escobar lifts Mrs. Mulwray’s corpse back into the front seat), turning to pick him up again, dazed, on the right. Freeze-frame. Dissolve to the earlier image of the distraught and battered-looking face of Mrs. Mulwray behind the wheel of the same car…
Lyrics:

Lovely, never, never change
Keep that breathless charm
Won’t you please arrange it
‘Cause I love you
Just the way you look tonight…

– – – – –

There are many other dimensions to Chinatown — the historical and political background involving the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the catastrophic failure of William Mulholland‘s St. Francis Dam, the purchase of Owens Valley water rights to irrigate the San Fernando Valley, and so on…
But this is a love poem — to Mrs. Mulwray, to the private eye movie, and to film noir. Just the way they look tonight.

You can watch Jim Emerson’s deconstruction of The Dark Knight here. Coming soon: In the Cut Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco, which looks at Don Siegel‘s 1958 filmThe Lineup. Emerson is a Seattle-based writer, critic, editor, blogger, video essayist, gardener and pedant. He is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also maintains his blog, Scanners.