Brilliant

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2007)

Watching a movie like this is like watching carefully arranged dominoes fall one by one perfectly onto each other. The plot is simple but the perceived facts twist and turn like they would in the films from the genre that inspired it. Like dominoes there's satisfaction with each fall but there's a doubt and a fear that there could be a mistake which would throw the entire course off balance. Right the way through there are always the right kind of twists and the right kind of suspense. The viewer is consistently disorientated. And it isn't until the end that you know that Roman Polanski got it right and that everything fell in the right place.
The perfection of everything in the film is artistic rather than efficient. I feel like there's sorrow in it rather than just indulgence. The characters, the acting, the beautiful framing are almost incidental, byproducts of extreme passion. The full credits roll before the film and slow down the viewer and ready them to take it in. The evil isn't underlying, where we expect it to be in mystery films. The truth is underlying, it's unknown, but the evil is always there, it's the doubt of the excellently acted JJ Gittes and the doubt of the viewer in the stories that don't add up, the things that don't seem right that force us into Chinatown. Force us to dig into the depths yet making it seem like our own free will, like the lulling of the blonde femme fatale, where our journey for where things add up leads us to the place where they don't, and they never do. Chinatown is the place where it hurts and things don't make sense and tortured mothers are shot in front of their daughters, where modern popular films rarely go.
A brilliant film.