Ominous Faultlines in a World Gone Wrong: Courmayeur Noir In Festival Randy Malamud In the sublime shadows of the Italian Alps, Courmayeur Confidential, Mulholland Drive, The Dark Knight trilogy), Noir In Festival’s 23-year run suggests America’s monop- hyper-noir (even ‘noirer’ than noir! Sin City, Django Un- 1 oly on this dark cinematic tradition may be on the wane. chained), and tech noir (The Matrix, cyberpunk) it remained The roots of film noir wind broadly through the geogra- a made-in-America commodity. phy of film history. One assumes it’s American to the core: Courmayeur’s 2013 program proved that contemporary Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, Dashiell Hammett. But noir, like anything poised to thrive nowadays, is indubita- au contraire, the term itself (obviously) emanates from bly global. Its December event featured Hong Kong film- a Gallic sensibility: French critic Nino Frank planted the maker Johnny To’s wonderfully macabre comedy, Blind flag when he coined ‘‘film noir’’ in 1946. He was discussing Detective (with the funniest crime reenactment scenes American films, but still: it took a Frenchman to appreci- ever); Erik Matti’s Filipino killer-thriller On the Job; and 2 ate them. Or maybe the genre is German, growing out Argentinian Lucı´a Puenzo’s resonantly disturbing Wakol- of Weimar expressionism, strassenfilm (street stories), da, an adaptation of her own novel about Josef Mengele’s 3 Lang’s M. 1960 refuge in a remote Patagonian Naziphile community. In fact, film noir is a hybrid which began to flourish in The Black Lion jury award went to Denis Villeneuve’s 1940s Hollywood, but was molded by displaced Europeans Enemy, a Canadian production adapted from Jose´ Sarama- (Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger) and go’s Portuguese novel The Double (and with a bona fide keenly inflected by their continental aesthetic and philo- binational spirit). If the prize was meant to recognize the sophical influences: surrealism, existentialism, nihilism, noirest competitor, Enemy is indeed highly worthy: an 4 and Freudian psychology. almost comically overloaded compendium of betrayal, American cultural chauvinists may be forgiven for paranoia, alienating cityscapes, ominous haunting silences, claiming ownership of noir: crafted in the hard-boiled obsessive (failed) searches for authentic self-awareness, jar- brassy national image, its edgy, cynical worldview subver- ring cuts, and shadowy fragmented narratives. A Cronen- sively foregrounded the unsettling underside of U.S. hege- bergian car crash taps into the distinctly Canadian noir mony. Its debut accompanied and reflected the early Cold tradition, while an enormously large spider calls out unsub- War/McCarthy period’s shady venality. Though it abated tly to Kafka. during Eisenhower’s Happy Days, noir soon reemerged But otherwise, Courmayeur’s North American pres- amid Vietnam-era angst (Cape Fear, Klute, Dirty Harry, ence was unspectacular. The French Connection). It’s risky to overgeneralize based on two dozen films, The quintessential mood and voice bequeathed by such but festivals inevitably invite us to extrapolate the trends writers as Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, even Ernest they present. So, allow me to accept the dare: all indica- Hemingway, pervaded the cinematic iterations of Ameri- tions are that American film noir is on life support, but can noir: Chinatown, Taxi Driver, everything by Quentin Europeans are resplendently reclaiming the genre they Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch. Noir became helped craft in Hollywood with a fresh and rich burst of the country’s indigenous artform, and even as it evolved noir that more than adequately compensates for the Amer- 5 into neo-noir (slipstream, fantasy, magical realism: L. A. ican exhaustion. This European profusion confirms the same kind of Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2, pps 73–79, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. existential and systemic shocks seen in the heyday of Amer- © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please ican noir. Their massive economic crisis (with its concom- direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http:// itant social collapse and political turmoil) is a likely culprit www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2014.67.2.73 here. Terrorism, too, is a probable precipitator. Widespread FILM QUARTERLY 73 Jake Gyllenhaal plays both Adam and Anthony in Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, an adaptation of Portuguese novelist Jose´ Saramago’s The Double. anxiety has seized European nations in the wake of myriad does convey a pervasive corruption indicating that some- assaults: al Qaeda-inspired transit bombings in London and thing is very rotten in Denmark—and far beyond (but Madrid; Norway’s domestic right-wing bloodbath; Chechen actually, as I’ll explain in a moment, perhaps especially attacks in Moscow’s subway and theater; cartoon-based vio- around Denmark). lence reflecting Islamic alienation in Denmark and the Fittingly, Courmayeur highlighted excellent Italian Netherlands; anti-Semitic attacks in Toulouse and Bulgaria. films. Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani’s Vinodentro (Re- Beyond this, an intriguing factor underlying the trans- Wined), a zesty Faustian parable laced with notes of Fellini atlantic reconfiguration of noir is demographic evidence and Bun˜uel, depicts a dull Trentino bank clerk who makes showing widespread declines in US crime over the last a deal with the devil to become a world-class oeneophile. generation, counterpoised by sharply rising European I can’t recall a better wine movie, not just because it’s gur- 6 crime rates. Of course the criminal milieu, with its con- gling with luscious Pinot-porn but also because Orgnani’s sequent cultural and moral destabilization, comprises film bacchic flavoring betokens a giddy, carnivalesque strain noir’s fundamental tableau. Europe’s crime spike has three that produces a fine vintage of noir. main causes. First, the collapsing economy creates an air of And Stefano Incerti’s Neve (Snow) is a simultaneously desperation that motivates more people to turn to crime. brutal yet tender account of two mysterious travelers on Second, the European Union’s growth means freer borders the run through quaint villages in a timeless Italian land- and more extensive international infrastructures, abetting scape. Its rough criminal backdrop accommodates, unex- crime. And finally, Communist regimes had stifled crime, pectedly, a shyly charming romantic chemistry. The film which has exploded since their demise. The post- ends with a fundamental plot point unrevealed—an espe- Communist rekindling of ethnic tensions in the east and cially delicious touch for a director whose name literally the European-Union-era aggrieved nationalism of the means ‘‘uncertain’’—that leaves the audience hanging west have both fostered an increase in social discord and open-endedly between redemption and depravity. I ap- criminality. proached Roberto De Francesco, the film’s male lead who The popularity of European noir suggests ominous was in attendance (he won the festival’s best actor award), as faultlines in the collective civic cohesion that Europe— he was smoking outside the theater after the screening and with its richer social contracts, older and stronger commu- couldn’t resist trying to nail down the ending: ‘‘So does she nities, more bikes than SUVs, less ‘‘bowling alone’’—is give him back the money?’’ He responded with a palms-up supposed to have sustained better than the United States. shrug of apologetic indeterminacy: ‘‘We don’t know.’’ European film noir may or may not literally portray the From the UK, Jude Law dazzles as the title character in specific crimes filling the continental police blotter, but it Richard Shepard’s Dom Hemingway, playing an intensely 74 WINTER 2013 Vincenzo Amato stars in Vinodentro as Giovanni Cuttin, a milquetoast bank clerk who makes a deal with the devil to become a celebrated wine expert. crude safecracker who faces giddy highs and dark lows as yesterday—they’ve been around for generations. In Amer- he careens around the wheel of fortune trying to get what’s ican noir, any remnant of normalcy tends to be ironic: coming to him. It’s worth seeing if only for Shepard’s for example Fargo, in Fargo, is simply a foil for an all- brilliantly inspired use of Dom’s penis as a framing device: consuming noirness. But a laconic, stolid (if often claustro- ineffably resplendent (albeit just offscreen) in the opening phobic) Nordic composure still endures in Scandinavian shot when his fortune is rising, it’s considerably less salu- cinema, keeping a total noirish collapse at bay even as indi- brious toward the end as noir’s inevitable vicissitudes take vidual victims may fall prey. their toll as Dom and his member come a hair’s-breadth Indeed, much European noir retains a lurking sense of away from corporeal separation. order. Perhaps that’s due to all the ancient castles, cathedrals, And finally, circling back toward Denmark: Scandi- and piazzas that still dot its communities. The European noir, as many have dubbed it, comes from the periphery noirscape tends to sustain a sedate, civilized order (except of Europe, a region that was less devastated than most by when it doesn’t, which is when the moment of noir surfaces). the twentieth century’s upheavals but which is lately ex- Courmayeur’s Scandinavian films all emanate from an ploding with noirish energy emanating from a dawning inbred community of filmmakers and actors that have traumatic realization (as I interpret it) that they are no been copiously churning out these gripping productions. longer safely protected from the shocks of modern life. For example, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s The Hour of the Scandinoir may enjoy worldwide popularity because we Lynx features Sofie Gra˚bøl (the sweatered detective from are drawn to a sense of innocence relatively recently lost, Danish television’s The Killing) alongside Søren Malling giving these films an immediacy and real-world accessibil- (the news editor in Denmark’s noir-ish tv political thriller ity that America’s more mature noir can’t convey.