Word: noires
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...album is stranger, more unsettling, more sour. Vocalist Beth Gibbons' voice is distorted on many of the tracks, stretched thin and left floating high and parched over shards of melody and jagged bits of rhythm. One song, All Mine, has a sound that might be described as big-band noir, with blaring horns and desperate, almost manic vocals. Another, Half Day Closing, ends with Gibbons' eerie wail twisting wraithlike into the ether. And Humming opens with a portentous Moog-synthesizer solo that seems borrowed, in mood, from a '50s sci-fi film. The songs on Portishead have one unifying feature...
...film--a deadpan comedy cloaked in noir atmosphere (fog, dark alleys, secret meetings)--does not merely point a gnarled finger at French gullibility; it gets at the universal impulse to create alternative truths. Lying is a way to stay alive. "When Death comes," says Albert, "we'll lie to it. We'll say, 'You've got the wrong guy.'" This anti-Hero leaves an indelible taste, somehow both bitter and savory...
...Noir! The very word sounds like a French lion's growl. In its undiluted form, film noir (named after Serie Noir, a French publisher's line of crime novels) is tart and murky, like cheap Parisian coffee, and as mean as any Marseilles street a gangster could skulk down. These dank moral tales are about the evil that taints everyone--especially the hero, who must end up dead or disgraced. This disqualifies Hollywood neo-noir like L.A. Confidential, where at the fade-out two guys and a gal grin as if they'd just seen Singin' in the Rain...
Maybe we should leave noir to the French and other outsiders; they are less likely to go simple with sentiment. Two handsome films, Jacques Audiard's A Self Made Hero and Arturo Ripstein's Deep Crimson, take a smart, stony-eyed look at chicanery in the '40s. Some cunning insects are on display, and not a tear needs to be shed for them or their victims...
...Virtually every scene is a single shot (no intercutting to cue emotion); the camera prowls like a smooth, stealthy voyeur. Yet the film is true to the ferocity of mad love. There is a deep crimson in the couple's passion that, in the end, can only fade to noir...