Chinatown

Chinatown; crime drama, USA, 1974; D: Roman Polanski, S: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, Perry Lopez, John Huston, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, Roy Jenson, James Hong

Los Angeles, 1 9 3 7. J.J. Jake Gites is a private detective specialized for revealing extramarital affairs. His new customer, a woman who feigns to be Evelyn Mulwray, hires him to spy on her husband Hollis, a contractor who works for the Water Department, but refuses to build a dam for the city because it might collapse. Quickly, Hollis is found dead and Jake discovers his wife, the real Evelyn, never gave him the assignment to spy on him. Gradually, he finds out Evelyn's father Noah is a rich owner of the water company who is scaring farmers away from an infertile land to later cheaply buy it and make a dam which will make it fertile and expensive, financed by taxes. Noah also pours fresh water into the ocean, even though there's a big drought in town. Lieutenant Lou wants to arrest Evelyn, but Jake helps her escape with her daughter conceived from Noah's rape. She gets killed in Chinatown.

"Chinatown" is a real modern thoroughbred film noir, capturing the essence and atmosphere of that genre and transforming it in the 70s: from the private detective, up to femme fatale, fatalism and a complicated story that hides many secret intrigues. Many films tried to copy the long dead film noir, but Roman Polanski's achievement really captures the spirit of it. It's not a coincidence that John Huston, the director of "The Maltese Falcon", here plays a major role. Even though it's a crime story with mysteries that get explained, it transcends into deeper meanings—by making the protagonist Jake desperately trying to discover what's going on around him and what secrets some system is hiding from him and everyone else, it symbolically speaks about epistemology and man's ever lasting search to find the limits of knowledge, cognition and enlightenment. Robert Towne's script is truly meticulously written, planned and conceptualized and is full with great little details: in one scene, Jake takes the visit card of Russ Yelbburton, a major employee for the Water department, with him from his office, and later on gives it to some security guard introducing himself as Yelburton, to get into restricted areas.

There are also many other little details that are just plain clever: in the land registration office, Jake takes a scale and hides the sound of the ripping of a paper document with his cough! In another great scene, he puts two stop watches under the tire of a car of the man he is following, Hollis, as we cut to the next scene in the office, where Jake observes the "squashed" stop watch, which stopped at the exact time when Hollis' car left. But the best part is that it's actually a film that's intellectually stimulating: unlike many modern light films where the viewers can "turn off" their brains, here the story actually demands attention and logic, offering great brain training. Jack Nicholson is very good as the unusual detective, yet he is no Bogart, and Jake is no Marlowe. Nicholson is strangely stiff at times, and actually works the best when he is allowed to be himself (the "Chinaman" joke). "Chinatown" is slightly unexciting and too calm, and slightly stylistically monotone—while Towne's script is brilliantly written despite an obfuscating story, Polanski's direction is somewhat "lazy" and too conventional, failing to enrich it anymore. Overall, though, it's definitely an excellent film, with such stunning and bizarre moments as when it turns out that Evelyn has a woman who is at the same time her daughter and her sister (!). Chinatown is mentioned only three times before the ending—among other, Jake admits to Evelyn he tried to help a woman there, but he ended up just making the things worse—establishing itself as Jake's cursed place, a location of bad luck, which becomes a Greek tragedy in the dark, bitter ending when Jake is forced to return to Chinatown, realizing he is trapped in fatalism and a cycle of tragedy.

Grade:+++