I’ve got to get to a library… fast
No cinema visits this week. Hellboy 2 still not released. Boo.
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Time in film can be interestingly elastic. The events of The Da Vinci Code take place in the course of a single 24 hour period, possibly due to Dan Brown’s lack of experience as a novelist or perhaps his desire to adhere to the Aristotelian unities. Or something like that. On the face of it, 24 hours seems like a ludicrously short period of time for the might of the Catholic Church to be brought metaphorically to its knees by the shocking, unspoilered here revelations of the film’s narrative, or for Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) to uncover them.
This time compression happens out of necessity. For example, how long does it take Jake Gittes to go from photographing Burt Young’s adulterous wife to being told to “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Two weeks? A month? In fact, and I’m not going to check as I know the film enough, it’s a lot less than a week. It seems like a longer period of time as a result of the film’s languid pacing.
On the commentary track for Les Rivières Pourpres (2000), Vincent Cassel points out just how superhuman the two cop characters played by himself and Jean Reno are to have uncovered the complicated, long-running conspiracy that faces them in just a few days. Cassel quite rightly points out that in reality uncovering this kind of conspiracy would take months of boring and monotonous research, if it could even be uncovered at all.
Yet we accept this as a convention of thriller-going and would feel rather cheated if, like the cops in Hot Fuzz (2007), crimes were solved by paperwork rather than by the kicking in of doors, or the punching of faces, or the shooting of guns.
Brick (2005)
In a related vein, Joseph Gordon-Levitt ties up another hideously complicated noir plot in under a week, although he has skipped most of his classes in order to do so, since Brick is set not in the metaphorical state of mind of Chinatown, but in the San Clemente High School which writer-director Rian Johnson attended. Loaded with MacGuffins, femme fatales and stylised dialogue, this is the kind of indie gem made for spare change that the Sundance Festival and seasoned moviegoers live for. A reminder that what you really need in the movie business is a unique point of view distinct from everything else in the marketplace rather than the same old same old recycled yet again. Even though this film noir is old as the hills in plot terms and narrative devices, its location in high school sets it apart and makes it shine.