Chinatown - Roman Polanski (1974)

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

It's not about, or related to, Chinese people, kung-fu, traditions, other martial arts, exotic food, or dragon attitudes. Nope, it's a revolutionary noir and belongs to a master who has lost his way in a maze that prevented him from saying everything he had to say.... Or maybe it's about how some rapacious investors made millions of dollars from..... plain water?

Roman Polanski, a director for whom my appreciation exceeds quantifiable limits in objective arguments, outdoes himself here. His foray into a closed and isolated world seems to me an act of sensational daring and exemplary courage. Until Chinatown, this entire pattern of films (noir) orbited strictly around only a few names - John Huston, The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler - those who made the rules and those who imposed them. However, the style that has succeeded over time in an important career, a solid public grip, and great success was to receive a major replica and an important new dimension through Polanski's film. Not that much changes regarding the ingenious detective typology, attentive to details, ironic, incisive, virile, and violent (only as much as necessary).... Not that the situations to be unraveled become simpler or more complicated, and finally, not that the narrative goes on a different circuit than that from mystery to its elucidation.

In Chinatown, all of these are in their proper place and receive the deserved treatment. Up to a point, the feature film even unfolds linearly and somewhat predictably, but beyond that, two clearly separate plots emerge, with the one abandoning the genre (the incestuous relationship) giving it its entire flavor. The split-plot innovation is so important here that, in unison, critics have decided that it represents a personalized centrifugal trend and have dubbed it neo-noir. The implications of neo-noir go beyond the deciphering of small-scale wrongdoing (family tragedies involving infidelity, embezzlement, abuse, or cover-ups that escalate into murder) and reach conspiracies, corruption at the highest levels, political blackmail, national fraud, multiple and/or cascading victims, etc. Once again, its particularity is defined by a deepening of the human side, the intimate justifications and ontological motivations of the criminals first and foremost.

The layered plot remains, but it departs from the center of attention in favor of much more precise circuits, which have little to do with the police or investigative structure.

As a pioneer in neo-noir, Chinatown excels at all of this. There is nothing overrated in its accolades and recognitions, although its true beauty lies elsewhere...because this film is somehow hypnotic. Everything comes as if in a dream, the characters have a contemplative component throughout, the dialogues have a melodic, slow, and abyssal rhythm, and the wide shots convey a unique sense of peace and balance...it is a superbly established dreamlike atmosphere.

Led through the intricacies of a scandal that tangentially touches on the high echelons of American society, but also the deep levels of the human being, Chinatown remains representative not of a specific category or an unmatched narrative method, but of the film itself...as a mode of artistic expression.

On all levels, Chinatown works in the same way: huge investments for flashes of brilliance, opportunely sprinkled over a dual narrative in crescendo, with spectacular revelations and surprising twists. In an epic succession, the film could fit between Huston's The Maltese Falcon and Lynch's Mulholland Drive... but such an approach is superficial and unfair, as Chinatown positions itself in a different register simply by the way it leads its audience through the script with masterful dexterity. Therefore, even the most demanding comments or reviews consider Chinatown a milestone, and I would add that on the road opened by it, little progress has been made until today...