*SPOILER ALERT*
(2006. dir: Manuel Pradal) At a skin-surface viewing, the story looks so precariously balanced on such a massive and untenable coincidence that it invites rejection. It's not, though: Pradal makes it clear early and throughout that this agitated, eruptive piece of film-making is, first and last, a sort of aching ode to Fate, to the workings of the Dharma and how it employs humans and human obsession as tools with which to manifest itself, to recreate balance. It's about reaping what you sow, about the total impossibility of escape, not only from the consequences of your own actions, as embodied in the boomerang which Harvey Keitel's cab-driver so lovingly hones and wields, but also from the repercussions of occurrences thrust upon you.
It's another three-human piece: Reedus is Vincent, a man suffering a perpetual uproar of grieving over his murdered wife, Emmanuelle Beart is the drunken neighbor, fixated on him and determined to arrange his emotional closure, and Keitel is the fall guy she seduces to her purpose. The thing Pradal does best is to give these actors plenty of space in and around the dialogue, room in which to move into fullness and life, and they do. It conjures some of the best from Reedus, who communicates wonderful things just through breathing, stillness and watching. There is a long and electric sequence, mostly wordless, in which Vincent sets up the man he is certain murdered his wife. Once his prey is in his power, he drives at night to a riverside, a wild place. There, he hesitates, retreats into the brush and we see him, lying still and silent, completely on fire with triumph and anticipation and a sort of incredulity that his dream of vengeance is coming true. It's a breathtaking moment.
The second half of the film drags some, but it's interesting to watch Alice (Beart), once she has achieved her own dream at such terrible expense, enjoying the companionship of the man she has so long desired. There's a hint of Adele H. in it: she seemed so much more alive when she was actively yearning for him, and, once he's in her arms, it seems she has to dampen herself, that her joy becomes an enforced mask behind which she hides. When she at last sets out on her final trek to finish redressing the wrong, it is not with Vincent that she shares a protracted, emotional, and loving farewell, but with his dog, the beloved Vickie, itself a symbol of both characters' ongoing blood-quest to bring the killer to recompense (Vincent's wife had bought the puppy the day she died, and Vincent races it, sort of feverishly, living off its meager third-place winnings).
"A love from hell," the cab-driver calls his relations with Alice, and the whole movie is sort of a chthonian love-song to the city, raising urban angst-scapes into hard, cement-gray life. When Alice and the cab-driver make love, wordlessly, in his subterranean flat with the subway trains thundering past, there's something infernal and awesome about it.
Rating: three and a half stars
Reedus Factor: five stars
(photo courtesy of fanzone50: http://www.fanzone50.com/Norman/acrime)
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