Chad Taylor

Blue Hotel finalist in Ngaios

Blue Hotel is on the shortlist for Best Novel in the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards. The paperback can be ordered online here.

The Ngaio Marsh Awards official press release follows:

2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists plunge readers into page-turning tales about who we are

From heart-wrenching tales of families torn apart by disappearance or deportation to examinations of historic crimes, swindles, and injustices to page-whirring novels about former cops and former convicts, the finalists for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards offer a diverse array of storytelling excellence

“When we first launched New Zealand’s own annual prizes for crime, mystery, and thriller writing in 2010, we modelled our Ngaio Marsh Awards on the Hammett Prize in North America, which celebrates literary excellence in crime writing,” says Ngaio Marsh Awards founder Craig Sisterson. “The Ngaios have never been solely about detective fiction; instead highlighting and celebrating outstanding Kiwi storytellers whose tales, fictional and factual, explore the investigation of crime or the impact or effects of crime on people and society.”

The 2023 Ngaios finalists announced today across three categories, like many previous years, says Sisterson, underline that original ethos. This year’s finalists range across an array of styles, settings, and stories, exploring important topics from radical empathy and redemption in one of the world’s most notorious psychiatric facilities to familial grief, dealing with dementia, mass surveillance, and the ongoing impact of colonisation and the Dawn Raids.

“The consistent thread throughout this diverse array of Kiwi books is quality storytelling that struck a chord with our international judging panels of crime writing experts from several countries,” says Sisterson. “As the likes of Val McDermid have said, if you want to better understand a place, read its crime fiction. Crime writing is a broad church nowadays, including but going far beyond the traditional puzzling mysteries of Dames Ngaio and Agatha Christie, and can deliver insights about society and humanity alongside rollicking reads. Many of our finalists showcase something about who we are, as people and a nation.”

The finalists for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non-Fiction, a biennial prize previously won by filmmaker Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) for IN DARK PLACES, a book about the wrongful conviction of Teina Pora, by Kelly Dennett for THE SHORT LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF JANE FURLONG, and most recently by Martin van Beynen for BLACK HANDS: INSIDE THE BAIN FAMILY MURDERS, are:

  • A NEW DAWN by Emeli Sione (Mila’s Books)
  • THE DEVIL YOU KNOW by Dr Gwen Adshead & Eileen Horne (Faber)
  • DOWNFALL: THE DESTRUCTION OF CHARLES MACKAY by Paul Diamond (Massey University Press)
  • THE FIX by Scott Bainbridge (Bateman Books)
  • MISSING PERSONS by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)

Each of this year’s non-fiction finalists delivered compelling stories that immersed readers in a variety of subject matters, from historical figures and crimes to deeply personal stories.

“There were some stellar non-fiction reads this year,” said the international judging panel of Scottish journalist and true crime writer turned novelist Douglas Skelton, Auckland lawyer Darise Bennington, and Ngaios founder Craig Sisterson. “From well-researched and fascinating dissections of historic events to deeply informed and personal tales, to disturbing yet engrossing accounts of the humanity behind shocking acts, we have terrific finalists.”

The finalists for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel are:

  • ONE HEART ONE SPADE by Alistair Luke
  • TOO FAR FROM ANTIBES by Bede Scott (Penguin SEA)
  • BETTER THE BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
  • SURVEILLANCE by Riley Chance (CopyPress Books)
  • THE SLOW ROLL by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)
  • PAPER CAGE by Tom Baragwanath (Text Publishing)

“There is no shortage of fresh ideas in New Zealand crime fiction, nor in breadth of style, with this year's entrants running from chilling thrillers to the cosier end of the spectrum,” says British journalist and book reviewer Louise Fairbairn, the Chair of an international judging panel for the Best First Novel category that also included South African writer Sonja van der Westhuizen, British reviewer and longtime CWA Daggers judge Ayo Onatade, and Australian podcaster and author Dani Vee. “Those debuts that particularly caught our attention were unafraid to explore difficult real-life issues and embed themselves in an authentic New Zealand of rough edges and grey areas, rather than glossy make-believe.”

Lastly, the finalists for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel are:

  • EXIT .45 by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
  • BLUE HOTEL by Chad Taylor (Brio Books)
  • REMEMBER ME by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
  • THE DOCTOR’S WIFE by Fiona Sussman (Bateman Books)
  • BETTER THE BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
  • BLOOD MATTERS by Renée (The Cuba Press)
  • THE SLOW ROLL by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)

“It’s a very strong group of finalists to emerge from a dazzlingly varied longlist,” says Sisterson. “This year’s entrants gave our international judging panels lots to chew over, and plenty of books judges enjoyed and loved didn’t become finalists. ‘Yeahnoir’, our local spin on some of the world’s most popular storytelling forms, is certainly in fine health.”

The winners of the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards will be announced at a special event held in association with WORD Christchurch in Spring, details and date to be confirmed soon.

For more information on any or all of our 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists, or the Ngaios in general, please contact founder Craig Sisterson.

Law and order


Mindhunter is the X-Files revival I've been waiting for. Of its many parallels to Zodiac the most apparent is its non-traditional structure. The unfamiliar rhythms lighten its subject matter and open them up to all manner of thematic and narrative exploration. It's funny and absorbing and you want to see what happens next. A lot of it is just people talking in rooms – not a coincidence, David Fincher says:
I don't care if the whole scene is five pages of two people in a car sipping coffee from paper cups as long as there's a fascinating power dynamic and I learn something about them. And I do not care if the car is doing somewhere between 25 and 35 miles per hour.
Joe Penhall talks about writing and not writing the series here:
[Fincher] wanted me to hire English writers and I couldn't find English writers that I liked enough to do it or to get their head round it. He's one of those, he likes the English, he's an anglophile, he thought it was much better I was able to look them in the eye when we were working.
It ended up much better for me to get LA writers. The women that I wanted were all from LA and lived 2 miles from the office it turned out. They were very classy writers, they'd written Mad Men, had Emmy awards. They couldn't really be part of a writers' room and be bossed around and paid a pittance and made to rewrite these 25 times. I commissioned them, I paid them, I got them to do 2 rewrites and then after that I had to do it.

I can't watch


I had a copy of Blade Runner on VHS. This was 1988, 89 – ? Incept dates. A flatmate of a friend had two machines and could dub copies and he made me one from a rental, with a black and white photocopied cover and I would leave it in the machine at home. I would come home from my day job and make dinner and open a bottle of wine and put on Blade Runner and leave it playing in the lounge while I wrote. I literally can't count the number of times I've seen that movie, in all its incarnations. Personally? The first cut with the voiceover is the best. It was compromised but the whole movie is compromised, like everything, and the voiceover gave it shape. I love the small things in it, like the bad matte painting when Deckard leans over his balcony, or the looping that doesn't match, the stuntwoman whose face is visible when Zhora crashes through the window, or every single moment Sean Young is on screen. The movie was a failure when it was released and criticised by everyone, but everyone got it. It had a ramshackle scope movies don't have now. It felt like a movie. Now movies are perfect they don't feel like movies anymore. They're apologies. This is our point of view but please, if you're offended, the protagonist's father, it was all his fault...

Blade Runner sequel is like the Velvet Underground getting back together. It's too late and there's no point. And you still have the Velvet Underground and you still have Blade Runner. Why would you want anything more?

Nobody drives like me. Nobody




Thirty-seven when he starred in The Driver (1978), Ryan O'Neal is no baby. Bruce Dern – pissy, unpredictable – is no cop either. This raises the stakes considerably: you don't know which way Dern's Detective is going to snap and the Driver is a man for whom the threat of a 15-year sentence means something. Isabelle Adjani, beamed from planet France, is as otherworldly as any Marvel heroine, and Los Angeles, filmed mostly at night, is the sci-fi cityscape the space truckers in Alien (1979) might have blasted off from. The connection is writer / director Walter Hill who was leaving fingerprints on Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett's Alien script around this time but The Driver looks backwards, not forwards. It came after Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) had already put new bursts of speed on screen which Vanishing Point (1971) took to its logical conclusion, and the plot is even older, from Melville's Le Samourai (1967), which was written by Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges Pellegrin and one of those movies you only have to see once to never look at stories the same way again.

The pervading sense of doom is suffused with artificial light, sheer concrete and metal reflections: dark gloss on the mayhem. The opening chase is genuinely harrowing with no comforting score or digital editing to aid the getaway in the tight spots and no wisecracks or memes to cushion things for the viewer – Hill is on an open road. The characters exist only because they act. Driver has no father issues or back story – his goal is to do what he does. Doomed but independent, he's an adult.

Hill's The Driver would go on to influence Tarantino (what hasn't? Although 2007's Death Proof is his most disciplined outing) and Nicolas Refn's Drive (2011) – if not James Sallis' novel Drive (Poisoned Pen Press, 2005) on which Refn's movie is based. Drive is diminished even more after you see The Driver but it was a breath of cold fresh air at the time. And finally, parked neatly (why should he pay?), Baby Driver, whose director Saint Edgar interviews Hill in a self-self-referential handover. Hill plays the old nice guy nowadays and has only good things to say.
They loved it overseas, but in those days, that didn’t matter that much. It made exactly zero dollars in the United States. I remember the studio had this huge sheaf of Xeroxed reviews they’d handed me – you could stop a fucking .45 slug with this stack, it was so thick. And of all the reviews in this six-inch thick pile, there was only one good one. And now, whenever they show retrospectives of my stuff, it’s usually the first thing they show. Sometimes you just have to wait it out.

The last breath men


Murder by Contract, directed by Irving Lerner (1958) sits on the cusp of hard-boiled 1950s and 1960s counter-culture, spritzed with hepcat chat and a jazz-ish nouvelle vague score before losing control and crashing in the same emotional dead-end as, say, Medium Cool (1969) and Vanishing Point (1971). Movies don't let go of your hand like that any more – certainly not the uptight millennial child-minding service that cinema is today. The director's camera-on-sticks style and the minimal production play out on the backlots and scrub hills that help bring crime in under budget for weekly TV. Perhaps in keeping with its chivalric twist Contract is coy, even prudish with regard to sex but both men and women are strong in it and the violence is nasty and real. When Claude (Vince Edwards) visits a California gun store the shot is framed with a little stand of Nazi flags in center background: Lerner's little note re: where the real killers have come from.

Trouble waiting to happen


Is Bloodline better than Breaking Bad? Easily. Season three proves it and closes the deal on the last adult show with guts; real noir, in the real now, smart and clever and dark as all hell. I'm a David Lynch fan but Twin Peaks is the past. This is the future and you missed it. So did Netflix. Everyone did. That only makes it better.

White rabbit


Fred Topel: How do you make a genre film your own?

David Mamet: Well, you can't help but make a distinct movie. If you give yourself up to the form, it's going to be distinctively your own because the form's going to tell you what's needed. That's one of the great things I find about working in drama is you're always learning from the form. You're always getting humbled by it. It's exactly like analyzing a dream. You're trying to analyze your dreams. You say, 'I know what that means; I know exactly what that means; why am I still unsettled?' You say, 'Let me look a little harder at this little thing over here. But that's not important; that's not important; that's not important. The part where I kill the monster – that's the important part, and I know that means my father this and da da da da da. But what about this little part over here about the bunny rabbit? Why is the bunny rabbit hopping across the thing? Oh, that's not important; that's not important.' Making up a drama is almost exactly analogous to analyzing your dreams. That understanding that you cleanse just like the heroes cleanse not from your ability to manipulate the material but from your ability to understand the material. It's really humbling, just like when you finally have to look at what that little bunny means. There's a reason why your mind didn't want to see that. There's a reason why you say, 'Oh, that's just interstitial material. Fuck that. That's nothing, right?' Because that's always where the truth lies, it's going to tell you how to reformulate the puzzle.

– David Mamet interviewed by Fred Topel for Diary of a Screenwriter

Tell me your troubles and doubts


Elliott Chaze's stomping 1953 noir classic Black Wings Has My Angel is available in a new edition from New York Review Books. If you dream of becoming a writer the introduction by Barry Gifford will set you straight.
Chaze was a fairly large man, seventy-two years old when I met him. He was cranky, bitter about having been mostly ignored as a serious writer but making attempts throughout our visit to pretend he didn't really care.
That's one of the brighter bits. But the novel sings. Go buy it. Chaze is very dead so he'll never know it's being rediscovered but that shouldn't deny you the pleasure.

Family plot



I read pissy things about season two of Bloodline but they're wrong: it's terrific. The first season was a complete and compelling noir; the second is a nasty bookend that stands without the narrative insecurities that have become standard for modern sequels / prequels / series. The writing is twisted and the performances are great -- never showy, but never too cool. The direction and editing is just plain solid. Bloodline has the bones of Jim Thompson and the flavour of a Barry Gifford. Go watch it. Best thing you'll see this year.

Powder room





I couldn't spend another hour of daylight


"What if you were driving in your car on the way to the desert and suddenly your engine stopped? What if you got out to flag down a car and you just disappeared?"
-- Darren McGavin on Kolchak: The Night Stalker

All things bad


The True Detective finale got it right. The series was about the relationship between Cohle and Hart (coal and heart!) and the last episode resolved it. The extent of the serial killer's murders was too expansive to depict literally so the writer and director employed metaphor -- an image Lovecraft and Philip K Dick readers would catch immediately -- and in that moment the crime story transcended its genre. Which, in my humble opinion, makes great crime/noir stories great. Think Kiss Me Deadly when the suitcase exploded.

The ritual of the Yellow King was a portal to another universe of parallel evils courted by all the characters. Rust carved the figures of victim and spectators out of beer cans. Even Marty's daughter when she played dolls arranged them in the same voodoo circle: she was toying with an opening to all things bad. It was no accident that fornication led to both Marty and Rust's downfall: Rust took Maggie from behind and the final straw for Marty's marriage was fucking a prostitute up the ass. Everyone fell into an opening, and the opening changed their lives.

Sexuality is not gender, and some critics have commented that there should have been "more" female characters in True Detective. Which is true. Instead of a triangle between a female and two male leads it could have been between three women, or a group of four female friends. Perhaps there could have been some light comedy to it, too, and better product placement. But that would have made it a different show.

Smoke


The Insider, again. Some days it seems like Michael Mann and Kathryn Bigelow are the only American  directors who matter. Which is wrong, of course, but the modern language of meetings and business, the euphemisms of corporate blandness, the power of the telephone and the text message, the dead cold hand of unfeeling legal procedure -- who else now really gets that? Fincher (Sorkin) in The Social Network, but that was that movie's subject. The Social Network wouldn't exist without the visual vocab that Mann minted: documents, coffee cups, whirring photocopiers, sodium lights, rain on the car windscreen. The Insider depicts the modern urban world where everything's talk but the pictures say it all, wordlessly.

Mann talked to Salon.com about directing the subtext:
There seem to be five things going on in every scene.

I wanted to direct, I tried to direct the subtext. That's where I found the meaning of the scenes. You could write the story of certain scenes in a code that would be completely coherent but have nothing to do with the lines you hear.

For example, in the hotel room scene, Scene 35, when Lowell and Jeffrey first meet: All Lowell knows for sure is that Jeffrey has said "no" to helping him analyze a story about tobacco for "60 Minutes." He doesn't know yet that there's a "yes" hiding behind this "no." There's a whole story going on that's not what anybody's talking about.

If you wrote an alternate speech for Jeffrey, it would go: "I'm here to resurrect some of my dignity, because I've been fired, and that's why I dressed up this way and that's why I have these patrician, corporate-officer attitudes." And you could do the same for Lowell, and have him sitting there and saying, "This man wants to tell me something that is not about why he's meeting me."

Al Pacino just took over Lowell's great reporter's intuition to sit there and laser-scan Jeffrey with his eyes. You know, he looks at him, looks at him, and doesn't move, until, after all the fidgeting and shuffling with the papers, Russell, as Jeffrey, gets to say his great line — "I was a corporate vice president" — with the attitude "Once upon a time, I was a very important person." And that [Mann snaps his fingers] is when Lowell has it.
CBS reporter Mike Wallace criticised the film's dramatisations as "excessive".":
Two-thirds of the film is quite accurate. It was dramatized excessively.

How was it watching Christopher Plummer play you?

Mike Wallace: Listen, I could have been a contender if I was that good-looking. He did a good job, I thought, he got some of my tics. But, the basis of the film was that I had lost my moral compass and had gone along with the company and caved in for fear of a lawsuit or something like that. Also, Don Hewitt, who is the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, but mainly me. That was utter bullshit. It was done for the drama involved. Then finally, at the end, I found my moral compass again, except it was not true.

In a quote from the movie, your character says, "I'm with Don on this." In other words, "Yeah, we should kill it." You didn't do that?

Mike Wallace: Certainly not. In the broadcast that we did do at that time, I did a mea culpa on behalf of CBS. I negotiated it with the people at CBS, which permitted me to say that for the first time in the history of 60 Minutes, for the first time in the history of CBS News, as I know it, I was told not to do something. We weren't going to broadcast something that I had done for fear of a law suit or something of that nature. God, that happily is not my reputation, and it was a lie. But it made it more dramatic.

I'm just looking / Just looking for a way around





'L'Amour fou was just a phrase and became thirty pages.'
(Pics: Miami Vice, Heat, Out of Sight)

Who's gonna pay attention to your dreams?


Ungraded set pic: Nathan Meister in the passenger seat c/- director Jonathan King.

St Valentine's Day massacres


The victim who has been hacked to death and left in the Bayou is an analogue for the movie itself of In the Electric Mist, based on the James Lee Burke novel. Directed by Betrand Tavernier, Tommy Lee Jones's Dave Robicheaux remains too faithful to the character, which has panicked the studio to cut the narrative in an effort to get things moving -- a mistake, because detective novels are all about sitting around. But the movie still works. It has Burke's voice, and his atmosphere and his landscape, with its sudden, emotional bursts of colour. In The Electric Mist could have been Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or No Country For Old Men but in its bones it's Chinatown, i.e. a movie that wants to be a crime novel: complicated and puzzling for most of its length until the resolution appears right where it started. Also: Kelly Macdonald. All movies with Kelly Macdonald in them are good movies.

It's taken me this long to see Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and if I had to draw up a list of the ten best noir movies I've seen it would come in at around number four. Sidney Lumet directed it and it's a fucking gem: modern, shabby, direct and as black as night. Shot in digital, interestingly, a long time before people were talking about that. If you like Black Widow, Against All Odds (one of the best remakes of Out Of The Past) or The Morning After you should really tuck into this. Lumet calls it a melodrama but it's realistic and dirty and moving. The DVD includes a good making of documentary featuring interviews with the cast, producers and director, but not author Kelly Masterson.

The end of our elaborate plans, the end


Forbrydelsen (The Killing) III starts off as a mood piece with Sarah Lund too far in the background, crowded out by her male colleagues. Lund has become the formalist instead of the maverick, the passive spectator rather than the active investigator, the weakling. Once she was driven: now she's just upset. The red herrings and interruptions are dispensed professionally to the point of routine. (Does anyone in Lundland ever finish a phone call?) Creator Søren Sveistrup shares the scripting duties this time around, presumably for scheduling reasons. The series feels like he hammered out a synopsis and the other writers fluffed it up. But things get going in the last four episodes, when Forbrydelsen suddenly becomes very good again. Stick it out for Sofie Gråbøl's performance and a tidy wrap up. Spoiler alert: everyone's fucked. Not a happy ending, but a good one.

Sveistrup talked to Holy Moly about creating the series:
When we started there were a lot of episodic crime shows. You know, these 45-minute shows with a heroine who solved the case and caught the killer and started dating the forensic guy, wearing heels. And I thought ‘well we won’t do that and we’ll try to do it more like a novel.’ Television is a great window to the world but it’s often used to do nothing. So I thought if somebody offers me this window, at least I can do my best. I can try not to be a recipe, I can try not to imitate the Americans or the English and try to do something original. Try, try, try.
He wanted Lund to be the strong, silent type:
She doesn't really talk much. She has to have these characters around her to push her into saying anything. The partner role is very important as it generates some pressure on Lund and pushes her in other directions. If she was just alone she would be speechless. And it's to show her annoyance with other people. She is always annoyed when the phone rings and that's part of the game: to annoy Lund.
Sveistrup has compared Lund to Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan:
I've always been fond of Clint Eastwood. The parts he plays are so silent, sometimes a bit biblical. If you watch Dirty Harry he's not especially likeable and I like that paradox about a character.
Director Birger Larsen said he modelled Lund on Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name:
"I wanted her to be wearing a poncho like Clint Eastwood and I worked with that for many weeks. But Sofie said that she couldn't draw her gun. I said, 'if Clint Eastwood can do it, then you can do it as well'. But she said, 'no, it's not right'. And she looked so wonderful, so sexy, so good in the poncho. Exactly the Clint Eastwood one. She came along one day and said, 'I've got this sweater, perhaps we should use that'."
There are nods in the final episode to a certain Swedish trilogy. Sveistrup told Holy Moly that his influences also include the Mark Frost / David Lynch series Twin Peaks:
"The first episode of Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of the body of Laura Palmer and the first episode of The Killing ends with the discovery of the body of Nanna Birk Larsen. But I saw a lot of shows before we started writing and shooting. I was a big Twin Peaks fan when it was first shown and week after week I couldn't wait for the episodes, but then I guess I was a bit disappointed when the resolution happened. But today I can see that David Lynch was deconstructing the whole genre, and he was actually making a comedy. And in that sense it's perfect.

"I wanted to see if I could do it with no humour. And especially taking the parents into it, and their grief, I wanted to see if I could portray it in a more realistic way instead. So I think I owe a lot to Twin Peaks but it's an entirely different genre. We couldn't invent things like throwing a stone to decide where the investigation went – which must've been fun to come up with in the writing room – we couldn't do that. We had to stay loyal to the grief and the importance of the investigation."

Safe





Well, it finally comes out that the idea of Harry the Horse and Little Isadore and Spanish John is to get Big Butch to open the coal company's safe and take the pay-roll money out, and they are willing to give him fifty per cent of the money for his bother, taking fifty per cent for themselves for finding the plant, and paying all the overhead, such as the paymaster, out of their bit, which strikes me as a pretty fair sort of deal for Big Butch. But Butch only shakes his head.

'It is old-fashioned stuff,' Butch says. 'Nobody opens pete boxes for a living any more. They make the boxes too good, and they are all wired up with alarms and are a lot of trouble generally. I am in a legitimate business now and going along.'
-- 'Butch Minds the Baby' by Damon Runyon, Furthermore (1938)
Victorian crime literature, official and popular, often seems obsessed with keys, as if nothing else mattered. But in those days, as the master safe-cracker Neddy Sykes said in his trial in 1848, "The key is everything in the lay, the problem and the solution."

We forget how extraordinarily cluttered Victorian rooms were. Innumerable hiding places were provided by the prevailing decor of the period. Furthermore, the Victorians themselves adored secret compartments and concealed spaces; a mid-century writing desk was advertised as "containing 110 compartments, including many most artfully concealed from detection." Even the ornate hearths, found in every room of a house, offered dozens of places to hide an object as small as a key.

Thus, in the mid-Victorian period, information about the location of a key was almost as useful as an actual copy of the key itself.
-- Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery (1975)

Rififi (1954), Thief (1981), Die Hard (1988), The Score (2001)

Poetics


David Mamet interviewed in 1997 by John Lahr for The Paris Review:
MAMET
Now, there's a certain amount of essential information, without which the play does not make sense...

INTERVIEWER
And how do you fit that information in?

MAMET
As obliquely as possible. You want to give the people information before they know it's been given to them.

INTERVIEWER
So to you a character is...

MAMET
It's action, as Aristotle said. That's all that it is – exactly what the person does. It's not what they "think," because we don't know what they think. It's not what they say. It's what they do, what they're physically trying to accomplish on the stage. Which is exactly the same way we understand a person's character in life – not by what they say, but by what they do.

INTERVIEWER
If you hadn't found the theater, what do you think you might have been?

MAMET
I think it's very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.

Noirs that aren't #2: Maîtresse (1975)


I first saw Barbet Schroeder's Maîtresse (1975) in 1983, at the Auckland International Film Festival. This weekend I got to see the fully-restored version on the big screen at the BFI, digitally projected. (It strobed). The graphic sexual scenes may have been eclipsed by what's freely available on the internet but the movie still carries a jolt. Just as striking is the documentary-style treatment of its contemporary locations: Austerlitz Station at dawn; an authentically bohemian apartment in the Marais; quiet restaurants and cafés; country roads without traffic. There's a grisly moment in a city slaughterhouse but the direction is so composed that it's sad rather than shocking.

With the passage of time Maîtresse has revealed itself as what the director intended it to be: a story of amour fou. Olivier (a very young Gerard Depardieu) has already met Ariane (Bulle Ogier) at her front door before he breaks into the downstairs apartment where she keeps her professional dungeon: he ignores her real self to invade her alter-ego. Once she has conceded her secret, Ariane retreats in stages. The dominatrix who starts out riding her clients later struggles to pin them down. As her relationship develops she is reduced to panic, interrupting her sessions and scrambling back up the steps. When Olivier supplants her pimp, she rejects him totally. The dungeon is dismantled and the Maîtresse disappears: her alter-ego is dead.

Olivier rides into the countryside to find Airiane (Depardieu teetering on a scooter) and deliver one last message -- an envelope stuffed with money, marked "I Love You." He has become the anti-client: a man paying Ariane to play the role of who she really is. She temporarily abandons her "real" family to pursue him and they share control of the wheel -- again, something that one could do only in a sports car of the period. They lose control, in the manner of Godard's Weekend, but emerge from the wreckage bloodied but laughing.

So things end happily. Or do they? Ariane has surrendered her mystery and her independence to two men, and it's clear that she and Olivier won't be able to remain together. Her obsessiveness is as apparent as Dixon Steele's: she is In A Lonely Place. And Olivier's wilfulness has ruined everything: homeless and unloved, he is back to where he was at the beginning of the film. The screenplay's mis en scene presents the city as a symbol of the subconscious, money is the characters' only god and sex is an escape. The great theme of film noir is: you're fucked.