Word: polanski
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Chinatown, Roman Polanski's homage to 1930s detective movies, is one of the few really good films playing in Boston this week. Jack Nicholson is no Humphrey Bograt, but he does make an extremely convincing badass private eye. When Faye Dunaway is good, she's very good, and in this one she's excellent. The plot is fun but ultimately insignificant. Worth traveling out of Cambridge for, Chinatown is playing at Cleveland Circle...
...gets curious. He goes looking for water, the blue water that goes rushing illegally out of the city reservoir every night. He finds it, gets soaked when it comes charging down a dry canal. Walks out. Shot of his feet. Curses his leaky Florsheims. And then up walks director Polanski as a short little tough with a foreign accent, who puts a knife in the detective's nostril and makes a little slice to remind him not to be nosey...
That kind of tense action is always in the foreground. But the background is continually in use as well. Polanski often has the shot divided in half down the middle, and while a character talks in one half the other is left for out-of-focus entrances, clues, touches of atmosphere. Faye Dunaway comes in that way, behind Nicholson telling a dirty joke. And in the background, literally and figuratively, is where the thirties settings stay, unpretentious, accessory: a blurry old Coke sign reminded me how much more obtrusive the nostalgia bit is in some other recent films, say Robert...
...same quiet sense of perspective keeps the pace under superb control and frames the shots with a touch that is most deft for being so unarbitrary: Polanski cuts skillfully into shots through windows, mirrors, bamboo curtains, cameras, binoculors, but the only cut that seems personal, intrusive, cruel, is the one he applies in character to Nicholson, but he does that with finesse...
...Polanski, Chinatown marks a certain proof of mastery to which none of his previous films gave him clear title. It falls in a genre he's never touched before, and yet it comes from his hands shaped true both to its genre and--in the unnatural, shocking twist of the ending--to its director. If there's any justice in this business Chinatown should be the big success of the year...