Seminal film noir and remarkable homage to the comic book genre

Rating: 9/10 (3 June 2005)

There's a tradition in Edinburgh called 'Secret Cinema'. Each year, on of the art house cinemas hosts a season of seminal cult films after midnight, away from the main auditorium, in a private area that can only be entered via the back door. Cinephiles, appropriately garbed like French New Wave followers, crowd in to share the secrets. Watching selected surprise movies from yesteryear, there are 'oooohs' and 'aaaarhs' as the little known milestones in cinematic history and recognised, together with the palpable influence they have exerted in the years since their release. The audiences are always very discerning and appreciative.
I can imagine seeing Sin City in such a setting. Packed rows marvelling at the aesthetic technological achievement, no less than the transmuting of distinctive comic strip characters into the speech, movements and situations of on-screen actors. I can imagine looking back over the intervening years since it had been released and seeing how filmmakers have learnt new approaches from this film, how in crasser hands each one of its tiny gems has been amplified into Oscar-winning blockbusters, how in film schools the methods have been critically observed and handed down.
Except Sin City is not a blast from the past - it is out now, and with considerable fanfare.
The buzz surrounding it should not persuade you to go out and see the film unless the content and methodology attract you - Sin City might be mainstream, but only just - and it would be better to describe it as adult art-house mainstream / thriller / crime with added big names.
Firstly, the themes are as adult as the comic strip it is adapted from. Sin City, whether taken as a metaphor or an actual (if fictitious) place, is hardly a place for the feint-hearted. Basically it's a specialist movie in the heavy, mysterious film-noir mould, with almost constant voice overs and hard-boiled one-liners like some old Bogart films. Only it doesn't shrink from mutilation, castration, cannibalism or a host of other monstrosities. That we are aware of the mythological-like nature of the comic-strip characters doesn't completely detract from the stomach-churning inspired by such things, or from the genuinely moving scenes.
Saying it contains heroes is maybe going too far. Some characters are just a bit more sympathetic than others. Like the exceedingly ugly Marv. He's been framed for murder and the cops are in on it. He spends most of the film semi-deranged, searching for the one woman he loves, a whore who showed him a few moments of kindness and for whom he would do anything, including laying down his life. Or Hartigan. He's a cop, one of the ones with a shred of decency left in him. He risks his life to rescue a child from being raped and mutilated. Or Dwight. He dispenses some rough justice to a rather nasty and well connected gangster. Then there's Gail. She heads a women's prostitute cooperative that includes silent martial arts expert Miho and several Amazonian types kitted out in leather and carrying Exceedingly Powerful Guns. That's just the good guys. On the other side there's Yellow Bastard, deformed by treatment to try and restore the manhood, and who uses his victims for sexual titillation before framing their heads in the wall like sophisticated African trophies. A filthy minded Priest (less said about him the better) and Jackie Boy who 'never hits a woman' (or so he claims before he beats the sh*t out of his girlfriend). Or Becky, the dumb trinket-slinging whore that you would be better off not getting out of the car to speak to.
Visually, the film is a bit like a comic strip with spot-colour in a half-world somewhere between 'reality' and artifice. In previous comic adaptations, the likes of Marvel heroes, Batman and Superman are fleshed out to be 'real' people and the audience is simply asked to accept the extra level of suspension-of-disbelief: In Sin City, the characters live in a murky underworld (L.A. a few years from now??) but, for all their apparent reality, will spin the wheels of a car or defy the odds in exactly the same way that a comic strip character would - simply because it looks cool. The effect is quite remarkable, and identifies the uniqueness of the comic strip as an art form probably better than any movie before. Sin City is less a comic strip turned into a movie than an homage to the comic strip genre.
The finely tuned use of things like spot colour are also brought to magnificent effect. Standing on a balcony at night-time, colours are faded out, only slightly more than they would be naturally at that time, yet the red of the heroine's lipstick is saturated, quite appropriately - as you may have guessed, the morality of Sin City is one where women are women and men are men (or horrible caricatures of one or the other) and there's lots of dodgy chivalry but no-one sitting on the fence. The overall colour sense throughout is one of the things that sticks with you, like the constant rain. Sin City works as a piece of art and as sophisticated entertainment. It is no wonder that it has lost none of what must have been the intensity of the original, due in part no doubt to the presence of author Frank Miller as co-director. Other big names awash - Tarantino as guest director, Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer, and Benicio Del Toro leading the action. For director Robert Rodriguez it is surely the most mature and compelling film to date. As Sin City 2 is still only pre-production, the best answer is to see this film at least once and then see it again - on the small screen it just won't be the same.