“You acknowledge you are not so good after all, and that is the beginning of success”
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The Bitter Stems 1956
Remarkably sweaty and tightly plotted, on par with the best noirs from Lang and Tourneur.
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Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl 2009
A scathing takedown of the madonna-whore complex. Falling in love with a spectral girl again: Luisa, the film's blonde-enough-for-Iberia titular character made angelic by de Oliveira's framing and blocking, always keeping her several stories up, through windows or doorways, shrouded by high culture and bourgeois accoutrements. She's tainted as soon her feet touch the concrete, a fallen angel, her perfection-via-omission lost forever.
The film's greatest feint is that Ricardo Trepa's sentimental rebel-accountant has a bigger problem than confronting the old-world,…
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Thief 1981
Confronts the fatalism that drives so much noir yet often goes unexamined--how to live when, in Frank's words "nothing means nothing".
Boiling over with class rage, and hemmed in by an existential terror that can only be defeated through violence; Admiring the simple act of a man at work while challenging the end result--the boss gets the spoils, the working man gets screwed.
Noir at its best makes you forget the tropes even while it uses them to break your heart. But don't admit your heart's broken. Plant the explosive, get in the car, and drive away while the building blows up. Don't look back.
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