This film exceeds the category of Noir and depicts: Life

Rating: Null/10 (21 August 2001)

Most American whites won't appreciate the parallel of this movie to Detlef Sierk's 1959 remake of Imitation of Life. In Sierk's film irony is thicker than blood as a young mulatto girl lives a lie in denial of her Negro heritage. While this is a seemingly common predicament in post-slavery America - upon critical examination - it is an awesome tragedy and a tragic tale of disposable humanity and lost virtue. In Roman Polanski's Chinatown a similar and very real feature of the arrogant American is realised. As an adolescent society, America has engaged in fervent incestual activity for over 300 years. American culture became incomparably wealthy from it's successful campaign of human tyranny and international slave trade, graduating to worldwide dominace of commerce and religion (ratified by the Monroe doctrine). Hubris took on a whole new meaning as fathers took their slaves who in many cases were actually their daughters(!) for mere sexual pleasure. Polanski, like the German born Sierk was guided by a perceptive europeon eye to exploit America's greatest weaknesses. Indeed, this is the FUNCTION of film noir: savvy exploitation of (a) society unaware of it's own predicament. This why it is a form of genius reserved only for the outsider.